HillilHMif' 



RELIGIOUS 
RHEUMATISM 







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CQPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 



J. B. BAKER 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1916 



4 



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Copyright, 1916 
Sherman, Frekch dr* Company 



OCT -2 1916 



3CI,A-138(;74 



To THE MEMORY OF 

THE DEAR OLD-FASHIONED 
CHRISTIAN MOTHER 

WHO STARTED THE AUTHOR ON 
THE WAY TO THE GOSPEL MINISTRY 
AND THEN WENT HOME TO GUIDE 
HIM FROM ONE OF THE WINDOWS 
OF THE FATHER'S HOUSE THIS 
VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY 
DEDICATED 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Religious Rheumatism 1 

Our Besieging Enemies 26 

The Icy Hand of God 39 

A Sprig of Evergreen 47 

How He Sends Us 61 

Little Samuel's Coat 74 

Dungeons in the Air 95 

The Hopeless Quest 116 

The Dry Brook 131 

Why We Love the Church 144 

Heaven 157 

Boldness at the Throne 171 

The Resurrection Body 185 

The Stick and the Axe 196 

Between Two Graves 208 

Finishing the Unfinished 212 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

Of all the afflictions to which the human body 
is heir there is none that is capable of inflicting 
such exquisite torture upon its victims as rheuma- 
tism. 

In the days of the persecutions an iron statue 
of the Virgin Mary was made so that the arms 
would enfold the victim and pierce him with many 
wounds. Thrust into the arms of the iron Virgin, 
the poor heretic was soon jabbed by knives that is- 
sued from the inner sides of the arms and by a 
pointed tongue that issued from the mouth. It 
was intended to illustrate the contempt of the Vir- 
gin Mary for those who turned their back upon 
the pope. 

But that suffering was nothing compared with 
the pain that the hot-footed devils of torture 
thrust into the joints and ligaments and muscles 
of a rheumatic patient. The agonies of the vic- 
tim of the ancient statue were all of the same kind ; 
the agonies of the rheumatic are almost as varied 
as the attacks are numerous. 

Now he feels a twitch as though demons from 
the pit had turned linemen and were drawing up 
his nerves and clipping off the ends ; now he feels 
as though a buzz-saw were cutting his thigh-bones 



2 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

into half inch blocks ; now he feels as though a bolt 
of lightning had struck him in the shoulder and 
discharged its full force into his system ; now he 
feels as we used to feel when the Indians were after 
us in our dreams, a slow, steady locking of all the 
joints and muscles until absolute helplessness oc- 
curs. Certain it is that if the man who intro- 
duced the awful affliction into the world were still 
living and could be caught he would be lynched on 
the spot. 

Where it came from or how it first appeared is 
not quite certain. The ancients have one way of 
accounting for it in their story of Prometheus and 
Epimetheus, his brother. According to this story 
these two brothers were commissioned by the gods 
to endow the creatures of the earth with their 
various gifts. To the lion they gave strength, to 
the fish scales, to the bird wings, to the hound fleet- 
ness of foot. Having endowed the lower crea- 
tures, they found when they came to man that 
they had given everything of value away. Debat- 
ing what to do, Prometheus said, " I'll go to the 
sun with a torch and catch fire and bring it down 
to man, and with that fire man will be able to make 
for himself weapons and become master of all the 
creatures." As it was said, so it was done. No 
sooner was it done, however, than the gods in their 
wrath decided to punish the two presumptuous 
brothers for stealing what they had reserved for 
themselves. Prometheus they punished by chain- 
ing him to the Caucasus, where the vultures came 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 3 

and pecked away his vitals. Epimetheus they 
punished by sending to him Pandora, the many- 
gifted woman. It so happened that one day, as 
Epimetheus went on a hunting trip, he told his 
gift from heaven that he had stored away in a 
closet a jar of curses that were left after endowing 
the various creatures with their gifts and that it 
was never under any circumstances to be opened. 
That was enough. After he was gone, dapper lit- 
tle Pandora went to the closet to take a peep. 
The peep taken, out flew envy, hate, jealousy and 
scorn for the soul, and chills, fevers, leprosy, epi- 
lepsy and rheumatism for the body. 

This story you will no doubt reject as an au- 
thentic account of the introduction of the terrible 
affliction, but there is one element about it that we 
are quite sure you will accept, and that is that it 
was not in the original plan of things. God 
didn't ordain man to suff^er. He made him to live 
without suffering. It is here, however, and like 
all facts that obtrude themselves upon us must 
be dealt with. 

In looking over the few medical books available 
to me and in recalling the cases I have known, I 
find that the disease is roughly divided into two 
classes, the acute and the chronic, both painful 
and severe. While there is some difference of 
opinion as to the origin of the disease, some hold- 
ing that it is a bacterial disease, others that it 
results from the improper elimination of the waste 
products of the body, there is little difference of 



4 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

opinion concerning* the predisposing cause. It 
almost invariably follows an exposure of some 
kind. The acute form attacks mostly the young, 
the chronic mostly the old. 

The cure of the acute form consists of the ad- 
ministration of salicylic acid or another derivative 
of salicin for the reduction of the fever, and in 
wrapping the limbs in cotton and the blanketing 
of the body in woolens. The most painful parts 
are sometimes bathed in water. This disease 
sometimes goes into the pericardium and some- 
times into the endocardium, and so completely lays 
out the victim that for months at a time he be- 
comes absolutely helpless. These cases, though 
severe, are usually cured. 

The chronic form is not so easily mastered, 
however. The physicians who treat them, if their 
patients stay with them until the end, will, like the 
Irish doctor, have to send the widow a bill for cur- 
ing her husband until he died. Oh, how they rub 
themselves with liniments and salves, how they 
drink root bitters and berry juices and leaf liq- 
uors ! I don't wish to discourage you, brother, 
neither do I wish to take any legitimate practice 
from any physician, for they are kind to me and 
sometimes give me as many as five funerals a week, 
but if you are one of those chronic rheumatics you 
might as well take the money you are spending 
for nostrums and buy an air-ship and have a few 
days of sport before you die. Even if it should 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 5 

fall down it would do no more than your teasing 
cures are doing. 

Religious rheumatism, in its causes, manifesta- 
tions and cures, is not unlike the rheumatism of 
the body. In fact, it affects the same organs that 
are affected b}'^ the physical malady. 

The only difference is the starting point. In 
physical rheumatism the disease travels from with- 
out in, while in religious rheumatism it travels 
from within out. " Out of the heart proceed evil 
thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornication, thefts, 
false witness, blasphemies." 

The religious rheumatism of the heart affects 
it very much as the physical rheumatism does. 
It impedes its normal work. The normal work of 
the heart is the sending out of blood throughout 
the system in order to keep it healthy. It is the 
pumping station of the body. When disease in- 
flames it and stiffens its valves, of course the body 
will not get its supply of oxygenized blood and a 
general tie-up will occur all along the line. 

The same is true of the heart and its religious 
functions. While we are not accustomed to think 
of our spiritual nature as a thing of hands and 
feet and jaw-bones and teeth, yet it is true that 
personality grasps and travels and talks and eats. 
The psalmist said, " The ordinances of God are 
sweeter than honey and the honey-comb." Surely 
they were not sweet to his physical mouth. We 
eat with our souls as truly as with our bodies. 



6 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

The congregation that hears a good sermon bites 
it spiritually, the mice that chew the paper bite it 
physically. You can't think of personality with- 
out clothing it with a spiritual body. It is the 
duty of the heart to keep that spiritual body 
healthy. It must keep the eyes of faith clear, the 
blood of devotion pure, the nerves of sympathy 
keen, the muscles of courage strong. When the 
heart fails to send a full supply of God's oxygen 
out into all the members of our personality, re- 
ligious rheumatism has set in and begun to pre- 
pare us for spiritual death. 

Religious rheumatism sometimes affects the 
muscles of the mouth and makes it impossible even 
for Christian Endeavorers to testify for their 
Lord. Christ said, " Ye shall be witnesses unto 
me both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Sa- 
maria and unto the uttermost part of the earth." 
It is the business of witnesses to talk, but they will 
not talk. They are as tightly frozen over at the 
mouth as arctic rivers are. This form of religion 
is pathetic, for it robs the person of one of the 
richest satisfactions that comes to the Christian. 
There is no greater joy than to testify for the 
Master. It also deprives the community of a 
benefit to which it has a right. The mouths that 
are stopped by religious rheumatism are like the 
oil wells capped by the Standard Oil Company. 
They have an almost immeasurable supply of oil 
flowing through their pipes but they have an un- 
measured supply capped over. 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 7 

Of course a capped well does a community no 
good; it is only a possibility. So is it with the 
Christian who yields no oil of speech. 

ambassadors of the Lord Jesus Christ, speak 
for him. What if you have no education and can- 
not do it with the polish of cultured speech? 
When Billy Bray was asked whether he could read 
writing, he replied, " Bless your soul, I can't even 
read readin'." 

Yet he shook Wales with a revival that sur- 
passed the sweep of the mountain storm. The 
storm shakes only the surface ; Billy Bray's re- 
vival went down like the earthquake to the caverns 
beneath. Down in the dark shadows of the Welsh 
mines miners fell on their knees and asked God 
what they must do to be saved. 

What if your past is such as to give you a poor 
credential to the hearing of men? Bunyan was 
so vile that mothers forbade their children go near 
the foul-mouthed tinker, and they fled from Saul 
of Tarsus as children flee from an escaped lion. 
Yet both immediately upon their conversion went 
and preached Christ and Him crucified. When 
you begin to speak, feeling that it is " not I but 
Christ that dwelleth in me," men will forget your 
past for they will see " no man save Jesus 
only." 

Sometimes religious rheumatism is most promi- 
nent during singing. Frankly, I tremble for the 
Christian who does not sing. I can't get away 
from Shakespeare's reflection, 



8 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

" The man that hath no music in himself, 
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, 
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils." 

It is true that something worse than treason 
might be perpetrated upon the ears of the musical 
if some of us would ever succeed in gaining the 
supremacy in congregational singing, but the 
Lord usually sprinkles every congregation with a 
sufficient number of good singers to prevent the 
mutilation of a hymn beyond identification. At 
any rate, songs should not be addressed to the 
musical but to God, and God likes the prattling 
and the cooing of his children as well as earthly 
parents do. It is great to listen to a clear, sweet- 
toned soprano as she wings her circling way to- 
ward the throne, glorious to hear a great oratorio 
thunder forth the volume of the storm ; but when 
the totals are announced on the great day ahead 
I have no doubt the simple " Rock of Ages " and 
" Angels Hovering 'Round " and " Happy Day," 
sung by voices good, bad and indifferent, but from 
consecrated hearts, will be found to have turned 
more to righteousness than all the rest together. 
Oh, let us sing unto the Lord, dear friends. 
There is nothing more compellingly sweet than 
the music of a sincere heart. 

When the mob was tearing down Nelson's 
house, Wesley and his companions came singing 
down the street and the mob dispersed. The 
Tenth Regulars, colored, went up San Juan hill 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 9 

singing camp-meeting hymns. Paul and Silas 
sang the Philippian jail open and the keeper and 
his family into the kingdom of God. We have no 
mention of their quality or their range. True- 
hearted song is the Jacob's ladder that brings the 
angels down, the good Samaritan that lifts the 
fallen, the miracle of loaves and fishes that feeds 
the multitude. 

Religious rheumatism sometimes affects the 
muscles of the entire face. It draws the corners 
of the mouth down and puts " crows'-feet" in the 
cheeks and furrows in the forehead. It comes 
from a mistaken idea that gloom is synonymous 
with glory. The people who are afflicted with 
this t3'^pe of the malady are always serious and 
solemn and seem to be constantly either going to 
a funeral or coming from one. Such a couple 
once fell into the guardianship of a husky young 
grandson of five. They not only saturated him 
with the simplicity of their Puritan piety but tried 
to coat him also with its severities. Whistling 
on the Sabbath was worldly and any kind of 
frolic, even from a child, on that day was verging 
on the unpardonable. Going out to the stable one 
Sabbath, Rover, the old dog, came leaping dog- 
fashion and put his front paws on the boy's 
shoulders. The boy pushed him aside and said, 
" Rover, you wicked dog, you must not romp like 
that today." The family mule was standing in- 
side the door, with his head hanging out over the 
closed lower half, his jaws and his ears alike prov- 



10 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

ing gravity, the picture of Nirvana. The lad 
caught the suggestion, went up to the old mule 
and said, " Jack, you must be a good Christian ; 
you look just like grandfather and grandmother." 

There are lives, it is true, that have been so torn 
and devastated that it would be impossible to be 
light-hearted and gay. When the shadow of an 
open tomb follows one or the wreck of a ruined 
home lies ever before the eyes it is hard to laugh. 
" How can we sing the songs of Zion in a strange 
land? " But Christ went through more than you 
ever went through or ever will go through, and 
though He was the man of sorrows the children 
gathered about Him as the angels gather about 
the throne. He must also have been a man of 
smiles. Religion in mourning is never contagious 
or inspiring. A drizzle never painted a cheek, 
neither did a sombre sky ever lift a lily. It is 
the warm radiance of the sun that does those 
things. It is the warm radiance of a happy face 
that lifts the faces and the hearts of the children. 
They are repelled by a solemn face, attracted by 
a sunny one. If you would escape the condem- 
nation of being a stumbling block to these, mas- 
sage the muscles of your face, push the down- 
turned corners up, brush the " crows'-feet " away 
and scatter benedictions as you go. When they 
looked on the face of Stephen it seemed like the 
face of an angel. It was so because the heart of 
an angel was back of it. 

Religious rheumatism sometimes affects people 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 11 

in the neck. This is one of the oldest and most 
persistent forms of the malady. Moses was 
wearied almost to death with it, for of nothing 
did he complain more constantly than the stiff- 
necked and perverse generation that grumbled and 
chafed about him. 

This describes the person who refuses to give 
up the old for the new, who goes forward looking 
backward, — forward because he is in the crowd 
and the crowd is going forward, looking backward 
because he is wedded to the past. It describes 
the man who puts the headlight on the caboose 
and the green light on the engine. He is the man 
who refuses to approve of the individual com- 
munion cup because the scum-gathering common 
cup has been used a thousand years, who scorns 
the weekly envelope and the graded lesson because 
the fathers reached a good old age without them. 
He believes that age sanctifies everything. If you 
suffer from this form of malady, then back to the 
tallow candle, the spinning-wheel, the goose-quill, 
the sun dial, the harpsichord, and the cradle. 

The manufacturer is ready to throw out the 
machine he bought last year for a better one on 
the market this year ; the machinist is looking con- 
stantly for the latest in gears, wheels and shafts ; 
the doctor is ready for the latest serum, the 
farmer for the latest implement. Why should the 
church come trudging along with a neck as 
crooked as a grapevine, prating upon the past 
and fearful of doing anything contrary to the 



12 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

practices of the past? If God sent us into the 
twentieth century He expects us to avail our- 
selves of twentieth century methods and deliver a 
twentieth century message. The reason why so 
many preachers are preaching to varnish is the 
fact that they have their ears on the tombs of their 
ancestors. The men who spend their lives in the 
busy, throbbing, quivering, buzzing work of the 
world will not come into the church to hear a 
seance with the dead. They want a science from 
the living, and if the man in the pulpit cannot give 
them something that will cut the grease on Mon- 
day and lighten the burden on Tuesday and 
Wednesday and every other day until Sunday 
comes again, they will pass him as a dust-kicking 
auto passes a pedestrian, and with as little con- 
cern. 

The reason why so many large churches are 
nothing but sleeping alligators sprawled on the 
shores of time, blinking weakly skyward and de- 
vouring an occasional preacher, is the fact that 
they are trying to live on ancestral religion. 
Eighteen hundred years after Abraham was 
gathered to his fathers the spiritually bankrupt 
Jews bragged to Jesus, " We be the children of 
Abraham," as though that was a key to the city 
of God. Now, if that wasn't working Abraham 
over-time then it was never done. Yet the world 
is full of churches that are doing that. They 
boast of the past, quote the past, rejoice in the 
past, do everything but reproduce its piety. 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 13 

There are staunch Lutherans in the world at whom 
Luther would not deign to throw a bone. He re- 
fused to let others do his thinking; they wouldn't 
recognize an independent thought if it were 
labelled. There are such also among the follow- 
ers of Wesley and Knox. They lived their own 
lives and shook the world ; their idol-worshippers 
lie like chiseled dogs at their tombstones and do 
nothing. 

" My Church, my Church, my dear old Church, 
My fathers' and my own " 

is perfectly proper in the house of God and ought 
to be sung, but let it be sung as the graves of our 
ancestors are decorated, only once in a while. The 
recurring hymns should be, " Throw out the Life 
Line," " I'll go where You want me to go," " On- 
ward, Christian Soldiers," and those that challenge 
immediate and unreserved action. 

Religious rheumatism sometimes affects the 
back. The man who suffers from this form of the 
malady is the man who can't bend, the man whose 
spine slipped down over his thigh bone and whose 
thigh bone jumped up into his back. He is not 
necessarily sombre but simply stiff, either through 
temperament or deliberate intention. 

In the pulpit he is the man who preaches over 
the people. The Lord said, " Feed my lambs," 
but he feeds the giraffes, or at least tries to. He 
is invisible six days and incomprehensible the 



14 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

seventh. He is as deep in his language as he is 
high in his manner, but his depth, as Spurgeon 
has said, like that of an old, dry well, contains 
nothing but a few sticks, a dead cat and some 
stones. 

In the Sunday School he is the teacher who 
drops it on them instead of handing it to them. 
His manner, his language, his thought are all 
thirty years ahead of his pupils. His illustra- 
tions are the illustrations of maturity, his points 
the points of another world. He sees the chil- 
dren sent to be taught as the seclusive dame at 
a second story window sees through a reflector 
the agent at the door beneath. He drops his 
mental bouquets as circling aviators drop bou- 
quets on the crowds below them. When the sun- 
beam comes ninety million miles to open the anem- 
one and the violet, we surely ought to be able to 
cross the years and warm with a more sympathetic 
touch the hearts of the dear little children God 
has placed within our reach. 

As Lowell and a friend were out walking one 
day, they came to the entrance of a Children's 
Home. Over the gateway they saw the words, 
" The Home for Incurable Children." As they 
passed the gate and walked on in pensive silence, 
Lowell said, " They will take me there some day." 
He was an incurable child. Only such will ever 
be able to do anything for a child. They will 
have none of the alabaster saint, however pure he 
be. They want and they have a right to want, 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 15 

for he is the only one whom they can understand, 
the man with a boy's heart, the man who still 
knows how the kite pulls, how the hives itch, how 
the punk burns, how the pool draws, — the man 
who, like his Master, can draw his illustrations 
from the life of the crowd before him. 

Oh, it is wonderful to be placed in charge of a 
planetary system ; that is what happens when you 
are asked to guide ten or twenty souls, each of 
which is worth more than the world! Be sure 
that you guide them well. In one of England's 
many wars a young officer was ordered to guide 
a company of men across a desert in Africa and 
attack the enemy early the following morning. 
All night long they pushed their spectral way 
across the sands, all night long they had nothing 
but a little pocket compass to assure them that 
they were right. Early in the morning, long be- 
fore the first streak of breaking day, there was a 
crack of a rifle and a flash of fire directly ahead. 
It reached its mark; the officer fell mortally 
wounded into the arms of a comrade and died, 
but not before he gasped, " Didn't I guide them 
straight ! " Oh, may our parting words be as 
satisfying as they. They will if we come down to 
the level of the child and lead him as an elder 
brother. 

Religious rheumatism often attacks the hand. 
When Pompeii was unearthed a man was found 
with his hand clutching a bag of gold. The sup- 
position is that he had a chance to flee but came 



16 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

back and perished with his money. " Where 
your treasure is, there will your heart be also." 
This is probably one of the most common forms 
of this malady. When we read of one man so 
stingy that he docked his quarryman for time off 
when he was blown up by a premature blast, and 
of another who was so accustomed to pull down 
the price of things that he always sang " Ninety 
and Nine " when the preacher announced " Old 
Hundred," we laugh at the satire, but let us be 
sure that we are not living in glass houses before 
we cast stones. 

How many of us have given in hundreds to the 
Lord? How many of us are giving one tenth.'' 
Captain Jack Crawford, the poet scout, makes no 
pretense at professional religion and says he does 
not know one church from another, but I saw him 
one Sunday empty both pockets on the plate in 
Sunday School and then go up to the church 
service immediately thereafter and have nothing 
to give there but an amused smile. Have you ever 
given your last? Speak softly when you call him 
heretic who has done it. We so easily satisfy 
and excuse ourselves when we set our few dollars 
beside the millionaire's hoard. But let us not 
forget that the great philanthropists gave as 
liberally in the days of their leanness as they do 
in the days of their plenty. Benevolence is not 
something that drops into our lives like a Christ- 
mas present while we are sleeping. It is some- 
thing that we develop, it comes like an education. 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 17 

like efficiency in music, painting or speech : it 
grows. But what growth in some lives ! 

There are oaks in Japan that are two centuries 
old and still standing in a flower pot. Such is the 
benevolence of some families. While others have 
grown to wide-branching, sheltering pavilions, 
they are the stunted pigmies of selfishness. Sam 
Jones said, " If God makes you, old sisters, wear 
in heaven what you give to his poor on earth, you 
won't go calling much the first few days." To 
the men who grind down their employees and keep 
all themselves he said, " If you don't go to hell 
it will be because that institution is burned out 
before you die." 

Friends, the hands that were pierced for us were 
not clenched hands. Oh, they were clenched to 
save others, clenched to save Peter, clenched to 
lift the fallen, but never clenched to save self. 
They were open on the cross, open on the mount, 
open by the sea, open in invitation, open in warn- 
ing, open in ascension, and are now gloriously 
open in welcome. Let the hands of His disciples 
be like His. What lines your palms may have 
may interest the palmist, what the length of your 
fingers is may interest the pianist, but your Lord 
and Master is interested in their mobility in con- 
tact, their tenderness of touch, their strength of 
appeal. 

Religious rheumatism often affects the knees. 
As a general proposition every church member 
agrees that prayer is a good thing, but thousands 



18 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

never turn to it as a personal privilege until the 
Lord ties them to a bed-post or a surgeon's table. 
They usually turn to every one else first, even the 
ward boss, as some one has well said, before they 
turn to God. They concede that prayer was the 
secret of Paul's power, of Luther's, of Wesley's, 
of Moody's. They fairly adore Daniel for throw- 
ing open his windows and praying thrice daily 
toward Jerusalem ; they beam with admiration at 
Knox for asking God to give him Scotland; they 
cross their breast in veneration of Miiller for 
maintaining an orphanage for sixty years by 
prayer; but as for themselves, they want to see 
the long green and the bricks before they plan for 
the future. 

It is true that if all depended upon God for 
everything as Miiller did, there would be none to 
bake bread or sew clothes or dig coal for those 
orphans. But it is also true that if all trusted 
God as little as most of us do, faith would have 
died before the mummies did. " O ye of little 
faith ! " is still the cry of the Master as He looks 
toward His disciples. In most of our temporal 
affairs we could improve ourselves by prayer, and 
in all our spiritual affairs. 

No man can approach his business with the 
poise that he ought to have who has not spent a 
little time in prayer with God. Clem Stude- 
baker, the oldest of the five brothers who built up 
the greatest wagon works in America and later 
added the manufacture of automobiles to their 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 19 

plant, never allowed a day to go by without send- 
ing a note, a card, a telegram or a telephone mes- 
sage home to his mother. It didn't matter how 
far he was away from home or how much it cost, 
daily the message went. It kept him close to the 
simplicities of his mother's knee. Oh, what 
sweetness and serenity fill the heart of him who 
daily sends a message home to God. In one of 
the fiercest debates of the British Parliament, 
when Disraeli was shooting gas bombs and shrap- 
nel at Gladstone and making the very air reverber- 
ate with his thunder, Gladstone calmly sat at his 
desk and leisurely jotted down a few lines. When 
the cannonading ceased and Parliament ad- 
journed, Gladstone arose and left the paper on 
his desk. Someone, thinking that Gladstone had 
forgotten the notes he made, went hastily to the 
desk to get them and take them to him. Instead 
of notes upon the speech of Disraeli, however, the 
volunteer found " Rock of Ages " written in Eng- 
lish and in Latin. 

" From every stormy wind that blows. 
From every swelling tide of woes, 
There is a calm, a sure retreat: 
'Tis found beneath the mercy-seat." 

Gladstone was a man of prayer. 

In the spiritual life prayer is even more essen- 
tial than in the material. A degree of what the 
world calls success may be obtained sometimes 
without prayer, but in the spiritual realm never. 



20 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

Prayer is at the bottom of every achievement in 
the kingdom of God. Like the submerged stones 
of the river pier, it is often unobserved, but it is 
there as surely as the giant stones in the river bed. 

Jonah brought wicked Nineveh to sackcloth 
and repentance, but Jonah prayed before he 
preached. Christ brought Lazarus from the 
tomb, but He prayed before He commanded. 
Billy Sunday says he would no more think of 
starting a revival without the prayer of the saints 
than he would think of beginning a baseball game 
without a ball and bat. 

It is simply impossible to bring sinners to God 
without prayer. You may talk to the sinner un- 
til you have worn your teeth down to your gums 
and his heart will still be icy ; you may fill him 
with oysters and ice cream and pay for it all 
yourself ; you may use every ruse and device a 
clever ingenuity can conceive and he will be as un- 
moved as the boulder that sleeps among the sum- 
mer breezes. But talk to God about it and some- 
thing will happen. What most of the so-called 
Christians of the world have still to learn is that 
the shortest route to a sinner's heart is by way of 
the throne. 

Christians, ask the great Physician to cure 
your stiff, prayerless knees and start you on the 
path to the throne! You will never be a soul- 
winner until He does ; you will never be anything 
else thereafter. It is the highway that shimmers 
with the light of glory and entrances with the 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 21 

music of heaven. He who prays much enjoys 
heaven on the way to heaven. Christ said, " No 
man hath ascended up to heaven but He that came 
down from heaven, even the Son of man which is 
in heaven." He was in heaven all the time He 
lived on earth. When He bids us follow Him He 
asks us to enjoy the same glory. 

Religious rheumatism also affects the feet. 
There are hundreds singing, " I'll go where You 
want me to go, dear Lord," who haven't moved 
an inch for twenty years and who couldn't be 
budged with a crow-bar. The only kind of going 
they ever did was going to seed, and carrot seed 
at that. They are too stiff to go to church when 
the church is only two squares away. Once in a 
while I meet an old pilgrim who tells me that in 
the years long gone he used to walk, with others, 
six and eight miles to church. Immediately the 
centuries seem to roll away and I am back with 
the old Crusaders. I see Peter the Hermit and 
Walter the Penniless walking from village to vil- 
lage and from city to city calling Europe to- 
gether ; I see families looking sadly at their aban- 
doned homes, husbands giving wife and children 
goodbye; I see them journeying in growing com- 
panies through forests and mountains, valleys 
and plains, to their places of rendezvous ; I see 
them kneeling before the high altar of the church 
and receiving the church's benediction ; I see them 
issuing from the church and forming into line ; I 
see them leaving their native country and pushing 



22 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

through the forest fastnesses of southern Europe, 
singing, as the wild birds fly over their heads and 
strange scenes greet them day by day, the great 
Crusader Hymn ; I see them, battle scarred and 
bronzed, in old Jerusalem, off'ering Godfrey the 
crown of gold, and I hear old Godfrey answer, 
" I cannot wear a crown of gold where my Lord 
once wore a crown of thorns." 

Oh, what visions these old worshippers, who 
trudged miles to hear the precious word, bring to 
our eyes ! They take us back to the heroic age, 
to the days when the church cried, 

" Give me men to match my mountains, 
Give me men to match my plains " 

and when from under the thatched roof came the 
answer, " Here, Lord, am I." 

How pitiful is the spiritual condition of the 
person who is too stiff in the feet to walk a few 
squares to hear the word of God. The heathen 
in his blindness bows down to wood and stone, 
but the heathen in his eagerness will walk a hun- 
dred miles to hear the word of God and will go 
back home with it as gold hunters go back to civil- 
ization with their bag of gold. 

Too stiff to walk to the house of God, they are 
logically too stiff to walk away from it. But 
you must come to the armory before you can go 
into the battle, approach the spring before you 
can give others to drink. What can a man tell 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM ^S 

of the divine Redeemer who never meets him in His 
house where He is glorified? To carry the glory 
of the transfiguration down into the valley you 
must first climb the Transfiguration Mount. 

Friends, the religion of Jesus Christ is a re- 
ligion of action. It is like the bicycle, it falls to 
the ground when it is not moving. " Come Ye " 
and " Go Ye " are words for the living, not the 
dead. Are you moving .? Are you on the roll or 
rolling on.'^ Dead men are on the roll, on the 
assessor's roll, the bank directors' roll, the cen- 
sus roll, the church roll. But no dead men are 
rolling on. If you are rolling on, at what speed 
and to what effect? The snail is rolling on and 
it makes reasonably good progress, — for a snail. 
But God expects more of you than that. God 
expects the kind of rolling on that the engineer 
expects when his engine is filled with steam, the 
kind of rolling that makes the forests echo and 
the mountains melt away, the rolling that carries 
a thousand tons along and still has power to shout 
the gospel of its power abroad. " Ye shall re- 
ceive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come 
upon you." Oh, what miracles would be per- 
formed if the children of God had swifter feet and 
used them. 

When Paul was converted he went " straight- 
way into the synagogues " and preached Christ. 
When Moody was converted he immediately began 
to tell the story, although he was told that he 
could probably serve the Lord better by being 



24 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

quiet. When Jerry McCauley was cleansed he 
immediately began to hunt others who needed 
cleansing. When the old fisherman fell under 
conviction in McCauley's mission he said, ^'^ O 
Lord, if You ever pardon me You will never hear 
the last of it." Surely if the Master came all the 
way from glory to save us from our sins He de- 
serves more from us than the listless ambling that 
we give him now. 

When the fierce Ashantee tribe of Africa broke 
out into war and the captain of the Scotch Guards 
drew up his men at Windsor, telling them that all 
who wished to volunteer for service against the 
Ashantees should step forward while he turned 
his back, the whole line stepped forward. When 
the Greeks won one of their memorable victories 
a herald sent to carry the tidings home ran with 
such speed that after shouting " Victory ! " in the 
midst of queenly Athens he fell over dead. Oh, 
for some of the self-abandonment of the warriors ! 
Why should it not be so, when we fight for Him 
who never lost a battle and always directs the bat- 
tle from the battle's front .? 

" Crowns and thrones may perish, 
Kingdoms rise and wane, 
But the church of Jesus 
Constant will remain; 
Gates of hell can never 
'Gainst the church prevail; 
We have Christ's own promise, 
And that cannot fail." 



RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 25 

Then up and away, God's grenadiers ! The 
world lies before you, but it is God's world and He 
wants you to recapture it for Him. Fight as 
crown princes for your inheritance ; battle for 
God if it takes the last drop of blood you have 
and sends you to your grave forty years before 
3^our time. There is a great day ahead, when the 
battle scarred and the brave of all the ages will 
sweep in grand pageantry up the streets of gold to 
the great white throne, and only those who bear in 
their bodies the marks of the Lord will be in the 
throng. 

" After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, 
which no man could number, of all nations, and 
kindred, and people, and tongues, stood before the 
throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white 
robes and palms in their hands, and cried with a 
loud voice, saying. Salvation to our God, Which 
sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb. 
These are they which came out of great tribula- 
tion, and have washed their robes, and made them 
white in the blood of the Lamb." 



OUR BESIEGING ENEMIES 

"Mine enemies would swallow me up all the day long, for 
they be many that fight proudly against me." 

Psalm 56:2^. 

It is a good day for man when he looks the 
serious things of life in the face and reckons with 
things as they are. It is a better day when he 
talks them over with God. 

That was what David did in the midst of a wild 
and rushing career. There were hardly two days 
in his stormy life alike. Now he was before Goli- 
ath, now the idol of the army, now the ward of 
Saul, now the refugee, now the cave dweller, now 
king, now writing songs, now weeping at the death 
of an unnamed boy, now agonizing over Absalom, 
now climbing the crystal sky of holy contempla- 
tion, now falling like a shot eagle into the canyon 
of sin. If Shakespeare's was the universal mind, 
David's was the universal experience. No ran- 
somed sinner in heaven will be able to relate any- 
thing to David without drawing from his lips the 
confession, " From that sin I also was redeemed." 
No poet or monk will be able to outshine him in 
holy reminiscence. 

The charming part of David's life was his un- 
broken, persistent tendency to turn toward God. 

26 



OUR BESIEGING ENEMIES 27 

Whether in joy or in sorrow, in sin or in virtue, 
in smiles or in tears, his heart sought God as the 
needle seeks the pole. Such a man may sin but 
he will not sin long. 

Out of the midst of one of his trying times he 
looks up toward God and exclaims, " Mine enemies 
would daily swallow me up, for they be many that 
fight against me, thou most High." 

Who his particular enemies were matters not; 
his battles are fought, his victor}^ won and his 
crown secured. Ours are still raging and the ene- 
mies that surround us are the ones we want to 
think of today. 

In childhood's simple days we thought of a 
city's fortifications as a single fort mounted on 
some commanding eminence overlooking the city. 
We know now that instead of there being but one 
bulwark defending a city, there are often con- 
centric circles of forts, each inner circle stronger 
than the outer. 

So I want you to think of yourself today. 
You are a city, situated on the river of time, close 
by the ocean of eternity. Before you, desirous of 
your capture and subjugation, are all the forces 
of evil, which are now or will shortly press upon 
you as persistently as the Germans pressed upon 
Antwerp. 

Your outer line of fortifications is the line of 
faith. We often speak of the fall of man in 
Eden as a fall through appetite, but appetite was 
the third fort to fall. The first force that the 



28 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

devil hurled against our ancestors was the force 
of skepticism against faith. God placed them in 
a garden with many liberties and but one prohibi- 
tion. There was one tree that was not to be 
visited and a certain fruit that was not to be 
eaten. It matters not one whit what it was or 
how you interpret Eden, the effect is the same. 

The devil came along and said, " You will not 
die ; God knows that when you eat your eyes will 
be opened and that you will be wise as He." 
That was the first assault upon the human race, 
and when they believed him and doubted God the 
first fort fell. Faith is always the first fort at- 
tacked, for until it falls the other lines of forts 
surrounding us cannot be assaulted. It was so in 
the fall of Samson, of Saul, of Judas, of all who 
ever fell. The Bible may not give us the particu- 
lars about the first steps of their fall but there 
is a progression in the capture of a soul by sin as 
fixed and as orderly as the progression of the 
Germans toward Antwerp. Before any man is 
brought low by indifference or dissipation or pes- 
simism or despair he loses faith in the living God 
and the things He loves. 

The enemy facing your outer fortifications of 
faith today is more numerous than ever in the 
history of the world. 

You were taught at your mother^s knee the 
name of God and told what a wonderful Creator 
and Father He is. Now some one tells you there 
is no God. He is not here in great numbers and 



OUR BESIEGING ENEMIES 29 

his guns are not very strong, but he bombards 
you sometimes and raises the question. Fire 
back at him the ammunition of God's old reliable 
arsenal, " The fool hath said in his heart, there 
is no God." If the man who simply says that in 
his heart is a fool, what a knave must be the man 
who has the audacity to say it to another. 

You were taught in your childhood the precious 
name of Jesus, and long before you knew the 
meaning of the words you were already singing 
the songs that proclaim Him the Saviour of the 
world : " Christ hath for Sin the Atonement 
Made," " There is a Fountain filled with Blood," 
" Jesus paid it All." How often you have sung 
them, how precious they have become ! Now Mr. 
Wiseacre comes along and says the miraculous 
birth of Jesus is a myth, Christ was not the in- 
carnation of God but a representative, the resur- 
rection is a legend, the crucifixion a great moral 
lesson, not an atonement. 

You ask him how many churches rest on a hu- 
man saviour, how much that human saviour of 
his has done for the world. Ask him how many 
sinners were made whole by his human saviour, 
how many drunkards were saved, how many har- 
lots restored, how many criminals redeemed. 
The city missions throughout the world are full 
of such men. Ask him how many city missions 
are preaching a human saviour. Ask the men 
themselves, after they have finished singing 
" What a Friend We Have in Jesus," what man- 



so RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

ner of person this Jesus is and they will answer 
like Thomas of old, " My Lord and my God." 
Ransomed men are never heretics, only theorists 
are. 

A human saviour ! You might as well hitch a 
draft horse to a freight train and expect him to 
pull it as to expect a human saviour to pull a 
world out of sin. The strength of a horse is not 
an adequate cause ; live steam under gigantic pres- 
sure alone will do it. Christ coming down from 
heaven to earth and crowding his divinity into our 
narrow humanity furnished the steam required to 
draw this old world of ours out of its ancient 
evils. When the power of Almighty God was 
crowded into the piston chambers of human limi- 
tations the train began to move. The power that 
makes men happy and the power that carries the 
race like a train toward the day of perfection is 
the power of a divine, not a human, Saviour. 
And I enjoin you to fight to your last breath any 
one who assaults this fort of your faith. 

You were taught in your childhood that the 
Bible is the word of God. Your receptive little 
mind was made a veritable mosaic of sacred scrip- 
ture. You were told that it is not only our in- 
fallible rule of faith but also of practice. Here 
again your faith is assaulted. High-brows tell 
you it is the book of pious men, climbing up God's 
altar stairs, lofty indeed but still the book of men ; 
and proceeding on that assumption, they study it 
as they study a cat in the laboratory, cutting it 



OUR BESIEGING ENEMIES 31 

this way and cutting it that way, until nothing 
but the skeleton remains. If you want to waste a 
lot of time and lose a lot of religion study the 
higher critics. If you want to improve your time 
and your religion study the highest critic. 
What does the Master say about the Bible — the 
Old Testament, the only part that He had and the 
part on which the critics are see-sawing today.? 
He knew it from beginning to end, it was his only 
text book. When He entered the Synagogue at 
the beginning of his ministry and commented ex- 
temporaneously upon a chapter of Isaiah He al- 
luded to no less than twenty books of the Old 
Testament. He knew his Bible. What did He 
think of it ? Listen ! He is in the upper room, 
praying for his disciples. " Father, I am no 
more in the world, but these are in the world. I 
pray for them. Sanctify them by thy truth; thy 
word is truth." The critic says the Bible con- 
tains truth. Jesus says it is truth. If it only 
contains truth, why is it still intact .^^ If your 
ring only contains gold the fire will melt the dross 
away ; if it is pure gold fire will not hurt it. This 
book has been burned in public bonfires in a hun- 
dred different cities. Have they destroyed it, 
have they reduced it.^^ You have the same Bible 
that Luther read four hundred years ago, the 
same Bible that King Alfred read a thousand 
years ago. This cannot be said of human books. 
Livy wrote one hundred and forty books and only 
thirty-five remain; Eschylus wrote one hundred 



32 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

dramas and only seven remain ; Varro wrote the 
biographies of over seven hundred famous 
Romans and all are lost. Time is a consuming 
flame to human products but it touches not nor 
mars the things of God. 

You were taught from your earliest infancy to 
reverence the church as the institution of Jesus 
Christ and the church building as the very sanctu- 
ary of the Most High God. What sacred mem- 
ories cluster about the church of our childhood! 
It may not have been " the little brown church in 
the vale " ; it may have been on the mountains, 
perhaps in the woods, perhaps in the city. But 
whether here or there it was the house of God and 
stood, for you, as the one divinely founded, 
divinely sustained institution through which God 
hopes to redeem the world. 

Since those happy days broad-minded men and 
some as shallow as they are broad have tried to 
tell us that the church is simply one of the many 
institutions of man for the improvement of the 
race and that it contains about as many errors 
and as much hypocrisy as the others do. They 
would bring the church down to the level of lodges, 
peace tribunals, and culture cults. The church 
is no more one of them than a mother is one of her 
children or the sun one of her planets or the tree 
one of its branches. These are the offsprings of 
the church and bear only certain traits and char- 
acteristics of the church. 

The church is not a benevolent organization. 



OUR BESIEGING ENEMIES 33 

sent here to open soup houses, hospitals and asy- 
lums ; she is not an educational institution founded 
for the purpose of educating people in lofty ideals 
and noble themes ; she is not a social center in- 
stituted for the purpose of giving the people a 
chance to gather amid pure and holy surround- 
ings ; she is not an industrial umpire intended to 
decide between capital and labor, she is not a polit- 
ical pilot intended by God to guide the ship of 
state. She is back of all these as the inspirer and 
comforter. They are only phases of her work — 
she is greater than all. She sends them out as 
the Master sent out His disciples and watches and 
prays over them and gives toward them, and 
while they may come and go, succeed and fail, as 
the apostles did, she, like the Master, stands se- 
cure. 

When man assaults your faith in the church, 
fire back at him the old ball that the Master fired, 
" The gates of hell shall not prevail against it." 
It has been fired a million times or more and has 
never broken in the discharge. 

Guard well every one of these objects of your 
faith on the outer line of your fortifications. 
Above all, do not let yourself be deluded into be- 
lieving that because these faiths are old they are 
therefore outworn. You are still using sunshine 
and water and air and wheat and wood and they 
are older than all these doctrines that have nour- 
ished and conserved the church. You do not dis- 
card water because it was once drained from the 



34 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

gourd, neither do you spurn wheat because it was 
once ground into flour by slave women. Why 
should you discard the old elements of spiritual 
vitality? The fact that they have outlived the 
over-emphasis, and misinterpretation of the past 
only emphasizes their divine reality. 

But enough of the outer line of forts. While 
they are the most important there are others on 
the inner lines that need vigilance as well. 

The second line is the line of the will, which is 
attacked by the forces of indifference. As soon 
as the volleys of skepticism have battered down 
the ramparts of faith the forces of indifference 
rush in upon the will. Before faith gives way the 
will has little defensive work to do. Only an oc- 
casional stray shot reaches it and never with any 
damage. 

Do you waver, when Sunday comes, between 
your house and God's? Do you hesitate, in a 
bargain, between the wisdom of the Word and the 
wisdom of the world? Does prayer bore you, do 
temperance meetings tire you, do missions weary 
you? Do you slip sometimes on the second com- 
mandment, do you trip on the ninth? Are you 
callous and careless in things that once received 
your utmost attention? 

If you are, know then that your outer line of 
defence has fallen and the enemy is pressing upon 
the second. As a matter of fact, that is where 
most people are being assaulted. If you are one 



OUR BESIEGING ENEMIES 35 

of them, end the assault upon your soul at once, 
for the farther in the hosts of sin advance the 
fiercer will be the fight and the more difficult to 
resist. 

Be not deceived by the apparent harmlessness 
of indifference. It means more than one less in 
church when you stay at home : it means one more 
exposed to the dangers of the churchless, godless 
world. When Rev. Guy Mark Pearse sat with 
the great Spurgeon in his pulpit, he remarked to 
Spurgeon during the singing of a hymn, " You 
will never know how much good you did me when 
I sat down there Sunday after Sunday and heard 
you preach. You wound me up like an eight day 
clock." Everything deteriorates in this world : 
the violin drops a tone, the razor loses its edge, the 
spark plug gathers carbon, the battery weakens, 
the watch runs down. We need a regular tuning, 
a repeated sharpening, a constant winding up. 
The house of God is the place in which these things 
are done. 

It is more than one less in a crusade if you 
stay away: it is one more exposed to the very 
dangers that the crusade is trying to obliterate. 
You can't refuse to help exterminate an evil with- 
out exposing yourself to it, for moral taint, like 
physical taint, lays quickest hold upon the inac- 
tive. Woodsmen know not what consumption is. 
It lays the sedentary low. 

It means more than one less engaged in a re- 
ligious exercise when you cease to pray. Prayer 



36 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

is more than a psychological massage. It is the 
open mouth of the bird in the nest, the sighting 
of the mariner out at sea, the clasping of a father's 
hand in the dark. It is the soul's whisper into 
the ear of God. Neglect it and you lose the in- 
spiration of personal contact with God and shrivel 
into a religious pigmy. 

Oh no, indifference is not to be turned away 
with a smile ! It is the hectic flush that foretells 
the end, the sultry calm that precedes the storm. 
Throw back the indifference that assails you with 
the volley of Christian consecration. Lend a 
hand, an elbow, a shoulder, two shoulders, all that 
you have to every good work that comes your way 
and things divine will take on new meaning. We 
are most interested in the bank in which we have 
our deposit, in the college in which we have our 
boy, in the store in which we have our goods. 
Things divine will never be interesting until we 
put something in them. 

But there are some with whom the battle has 
shifted to the third line of fortifications. With 
faith reduced and the will crushed, they are now 
fighting the things of appetite. The forces of dis- 
sipation are the ones that are pressing upon them 
today. Life to them has reduced itself to the 
" eat, drink and be merry " policy. Some are 
sipping the pleasures of life daintily, as the bee 
fills its pouch with honey, some, lower fallen, are 
finding their pleasures, like foraging dogs among 
garbage cans, in secret and in darkness ; others 



OUR BESIEGING ENEMIES a7 

find their gratification in shameless, open de- 
bauchery and are in sin as the swine wallow in 
their filth. 

Untold thousands are pushed back upon this 
line and are fighting the most pitiful fight this old 
world of sin and sorrow ever knew. The other as- 
saults on the outer lines can be met with a clear 
mind and strong nerves but here the battle is 
fought with broken weapons. From the first in- 
dulgence dissipation reduces the resisting power 
of both body and soul. It is a slow paralysis, a 
rheumatic progression, a cardiac hardening that 
leaves us weaker as the burden increases. 

Talk not harshly, ye who were nurtured in the 
green-house fragrance of a Christian home, when 
you see the bloated wretch and the painted com- 
moner go down after a trial or two at better liv- 
ing. They may have put more teeth-gritting, 
fist-clenching fight into those few days of decency 
than you have put in your fifty smug years. 

" What's done we partly may compute, 
But know not what's resisted." 

O brother of the battling garrison, with the hot 
shells of temptation pouring upon you and the 
hissing fuses of desire burning within you, don't 
give up the battle. The vilest has been redeemed 
and so may you. Jere McCauley and Samuel 
Hadley slept in barrels and rolled in gutters be- 
fore the Lord helped them to their feet and to a 



38 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

throne. John L. Sullivan was dead drunk when 
his household furniture was taken from his home 
to pay his debts and now he is under a five year 
contract to go up and down the country preach- 
ing temperance. When the old cobbler of Nan- 
tucket laid his hand on the shoulder of the town 
drunkard and said, " There is one who can help 
you, John," he little dreamed that he was speak- 
ing the magic words to a future great reformer. 
But under that dirty hat and ragged coat was 
John B. Gough, who for forty fruitful years was 
to preach the gospel of temperance to all the 
world. 

Oh, it is wonderful how God can take human 
junk and remold it into the likeness of His Son. 

Don't let your past failures oppress you, 
brother. Washington lost more battles than he 
won, but he won the Revolution. It is not the 
number of battles won that wins the victory but 
the winding up of the war. Trust in God and 
stand your ground and victory will be yours 
though all hell oppose you. Never mind the odds 
against you. Nothing is impossible with God. 

When the Japs were storming Port Arthur in 
the Russian-Japanese war, the message was sent 
back to Japan, " It is impossible to take Port 
Arthur." Immediately the message flashed back, 
" The Mikado expects his soldiers to do the im- 
possible." And the fort was taken. God expects 
you to do the impossible also, because " He that is 
in you is greater than he that is in the world." 



THE ICY HAND OF GOD 

" He giveth snow like wool ; he scattereth the hoar frost 
like ashes; he casteth forth his ice like morsels." 

Psalm 147:16. 

The beautiful snow is a delightful theme for 
contemplation in the torrid days of August, and 
the picture of snow-covered Matterhorn the 
choicest art. But about the latter part of 
March we are willing to make a voluntary assign- 
ment of all our interest in every piece of such 
poetry or art to any one who wishes it. 

The succession of the seasons, as we know it in 
the temperate zone, is probably the most pleasing 
arrangement the Lord ever gave to man. Yet, 
like children with their toys, we often grow weary 
of the very thing we longed for most. Of nothing 
do we grow weary more quickly than of winter. 
Frozen pipes and frozen hydrants, frozen pave- 
ments and frozen roads soon freeze our enthu- 
siasm. And when the time comes to hand zero 
weather over to the southern hemisphere we do 
it with the same relief that the sheriff of one state 
feels when he hands a desperado over to the sheriff 
of another. 

But in the text I discover that the hand of God 

is in the frost and the snow and the ice and so it 

39 



40 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

cannot be an unmitigated evil, if it be an evil at all. 

As the cotton picker picks the cotton from his 
basket and throws it into the gin, God gives the 
snow ; as the husband scatters ashes in the mire, 
so He scattereth hoar frost ; as the wife throws 
out the crumbs for the birds in winter, the hand 
of God casts forth the ice. The picture is homely 
but the text is striking in its language and clear 
in its message. It tells us as soon as we read it 
that the hand of God is in nature. There was a 
time when this was undisputed. In primitive ages 
every phenomenon of nature had its particular 
god. The thunderbolt had its god, the harvest 
and the sea had theirs. Everything in physical 
nature, everything in human nature, was under the 
superintendence of some divinity. Jewish and 
Christian thought associated the things of nature 
not with many gods but with one God, the God 
above all gods. 

Science with its telescope, its microscope and 
its crucible has reduced many of the phenomena 
of nature to law. The ocean currents, the trade 
winds, the rise and fall of temperature, the snow, 
the rain, the frost and the ice all follow fixed and 
immutable laws, and from certain conditions we 
know what will happen tomorrow and the day 
after tomorrow. In the realm of astronomy we 
even know what will happen a century from now. 
The result has been that law has pushed God 
so far into the background, to many minds, that 
He is almost excluded from His universe entirely. 



THE ICY HAND OF GOD 41 

But law without interested personality is nothing. 
If system and law suffice, then why send an en- 
gineer with a engine, a captain with a ship, a gen- 
eral with an army? God did more than press the 
button and start the exposition. " The voice of 
the Lord is upon many waters." " He maketh 
the clouds His chariots." " He cutteth out rivers 
among the rocks and marks the path for the light- 
ning." *' He notes the sparrow's fall." These 
are not the deeds of an " absentee God." They 
are the work of Him Who never sleeps and never 
forgets His own. They bring God very near, not 
only to us but to the world of nature that sur- 
rounds us. We virtually hear his voice in the 
music of the birds, the whispering of the winds, 
the surging of the sea. 

But you say there is not much comfort in the 
nipping, biting, shrieking winds of winter and 
nothing very gracious in the thaw and the ice. 
Are you sure? Would God send them if they 
were not good, when " all things work together 
for good "? The very way in which the Psalmist 
describes God giving the snow proves a benevolent 
purpose. " He giveth snow like wool." Wool is 
used for warmth. All farmers know that snow is 
a protection to the wheat in the ground, a blanket 
to keep and guard the coming harvest during its 
infant slumber. 

And has the frost no purpose? Farmers la- 
ment the fact that they have so much spraying to 
do, so many insects to kill, so many scales to 



42 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

poison. But they would have a great many more 
if the Lord would not kill a few quadrillions him- 
self. The night winds that sting our cheeks and 
sometimes make us shiver in our houses are the 
executioners of countless pests that prey upon the 
grain of the fields and the fruits of the orchards 
and the human beings who enjoy them. And but 
for them we should have a losing battle to fight 
against our enemies. What would become of us 
if the flies and the mosquitoes were not almost ex- 
terminated once a year? The flies can lay forty 
eggs in a single night and each becomes the 
parent of millions of off^springs ; the mosquito lays 
eggs that hatch the same afternoon and become 
the parent of between one and two million more in 
a single month. We should be poisoned to death, 
if not worried to death, if the icy hand of God 
would not intervene and execute these insect des- 
peradoes for us. The hand that scatters snow 
and frost is the hand that saves the world. 

In this thought I find a precious message for 
the soul. The cheek is not the only part of man 
that feels the icy blast of winter winds. The 
soul's teeth chatter too, sometimes. We think, 
when we are pushing our way through the wind 
and the snow, that we are doing all that we can in 
resistance to the elements. But the mother who 
has given up her child, the husband who has lost 
his wife, the wife who has lost her husband, the 
friend who has been betrayed by a friend, has 
faced a fiercer and a colder blast than ever swept 



THE ICY HAND OF GOD 43 

our streets or snapped our trees. Nature's win- 
try storms last but a few days ; the storm of the 
soul outlasts the winters of Iceland. Oh, how 
cold, how cruel does the hand of God seem then ! 
How indifferent His heart! But remember the 
snow and the ice of the river and the field and 
know that God cares more for you than He does 
for the tree that perishes and the grass that 
withers. 

" Behind his frowning providence 
He hides a smiling face." 

You may wonder sometimes why your sorrow 
had to come upon you, when others less devout 
and less careful escaped, and you may perhaps re- 
sist the inference that your sorrow was sent to 
you because you were in special need of purging. 
Ah, friends, God does not always send our afflic- 
tions to save or purge our own lives but to purge 
the lives of us all. We all fill up with worldli- 
ness ; sins of various kinds creep in and they must 
be slain. Our common humanity would perish 
without it. Winter must be sent somewhere. If 
all got what they deserved it would smite us all. 
But if all were smitten the work of the world 
would suffer. We should be in a state of con- 
stant mental and business paralysis. So God 
sends the cold wave only over some souls as He 
does only over some states. Some soul must 
catch the worst, others will catch it in a lesser de- 
gree. All by it are purged and made better. 



44 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

How biting, how chilling was the blast that struck 
poor Mrs. McKinley when her great Christian 
husband closed his eyes and left her alone. Oh, 
it was dark and it was cold ! How the night winds 
howled through her soul, how the north wind 
raved, how bleak and barren was everything! 
But the whole country shared her sorrow and par- 
ticipated also in the purging. The day in which 
the President was in Buffalo to deliver his speech 
the country was boasting of its great wealth and 
prestige, feeling like Nebuchadnezzar on top of 
his palace. The next day the nation was on its 
knees imploring God to spare their chief execu- 
tive, and all the selfishness of the nation was 
frozen at the fountain. 

The icy hand of God sends such wintry blasts 
and some homes must be in the center of the path. 
What God did to the whole nation through the 
sorrow of its executive mansion He often does to 
a community through the sorrows of a cottage. 
That He chooses to send the blast in the direc- 
tion of your home now should not be strange or 
alarming. All homes meet it sometime. When 
it comes our way, let us remember that it is more 
than a personal grief. Let us see in it the gen- 
eral blessing conveyed through our sufferings to 
our fellow men. This will turn our darkened 
chamber into a new Calvary and lift our personal 
grief into another atonement. 

Yet, sorrow is sorrow and winter is winter, and 



THE ICY HAND OF GOD 45 

in spite of all our rosy interpretations our per- 
sonal grief will likely overwhelm us and stun and 
perhaps prostrate us when it comes our way. 
That it should is not surprising. The frost that 
blesses the earth crumbles it first into billions 
upon billions of particles. But for the pulveriz- 
ing of the soil by the frost the farmer's ploughing 
would be in vain. God ploughs first, then man. 
If the icy hand of God breaks up the field before 
the field can yield its harvest, why should it seem 
strange that we must be broken up before we can 
yield ? 

" All are but parts of one stupendous whole." 

The fruitlessness of many lives is due to the 
absence of sorrow. The frost has never broken 
them up and they have developed a hard-packed 
selfishness as barren as the city alley. The world 
is full of vocalists who could sing beautifully if 
the tremulo of an open tomb were added to their 
register. The world is full of preachers who 
could preach comfortingly if the Master's wilder- 
ness were added to their ease. 

Our lives are like the iron bands that the me- 
diaeval prince is said to have stretched from his 
castle to a hill across the valley. He expected 
the winds that swept the valley to play them as a 
giant harp. But they were as silent as the ore 
of the mountain. Finally, however, when a for- 
est-levelling storm came along the music came. 



46 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

Then it sounded as though all the choirs of heaven 
had rushed to the open gates to give the earth a 
baptism of harmonic glory. They needed the ter- 
rific to produce the beautiful. 

So do we. Oh, let us look ahead when sorrow 
comes and thank God that we are counted worthy 
to suffer and fit to bless. " If we suffer with him 
we shall also reign with him." Let us go to our 
western window and, looking across to the win- 
dows of our Father's mansion, say with Ella 
Wheeler Wilcox: 

" I will not doubt, though all my ships at sea 

Come drifting home with broken masts and sails; 

I shall believe the hand which never fails, 
From seeming evil worketh good for me; 

And though I weep because those sails are battered. 
Still will I cry, while my best hopes lie shattered, 
I trust in Thee." 

" I will not doubt, though sorrows fall like rain. 
And troubles swarm like bees about a hive; 

I shall believe the heights for which I strive 
Are only reached by anguish and by pain; 

And though I groan and tremble with my crosses, 
I yet shall see, through my severest losses. 
The greater gain." 



A SPRIG OF EVERGREEN 

" The hope which is laid up for you in heaven." 

Col. 1:5. 

Among the many stories that have come down 
to us from the misty realm of fable there is one 
which tells us of two brothers to whom was jointly 
assigned the task of filling the world with inhabi- 
tants. One of them was to do the work, the other 
superintend it. 

One after another the different animals were 
made, — this one endowed with swiftness of foot, 
that one with strength of limb, another with cun- 
ning. Some were given fins, some wings, some 
claws, some feathery coverings, some scaly. So 
prodigal were they with their gifts that when they 
came to endow man they had practically nothing 
left but undesirable curses, which of course they 
would not give. While in their quandary Prome- 
theus, one of the brothers, said, " I'll carry a 
torch to the sun and ignite it and give man the 
gift of fire. With that he will be able to forge 
for himself weapons and make himself mightier 
than all creatures." As it was said, so it was 
done. He carried his torch to the sun and 
brought back to man the last best gift of nature. 

The gift of fire so incensed Jupiter, so runs the 

47 



48 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

ancient story, that he immediately had Prome- 
theus chained to the Caucasus, to be preyed upon 
by vultures, and the people who received the fire 
punished by the creation of woman. All the gods 
of Olympus contributed to her composition. 
Venus gave her beauty. Mercury persuasion, 
Apollo music ; hence she was called Pandora, 
which means all-gifted. She was made so attrac- 
tive that she would be sure to beguile man and 
bring upon him the vengeance that Jupiter felt 
toward him. 

It so happened that the other brother was the 
one who received her as his spouse. It was not 
long, of course, until he told her of the jar of 
curses that he had sealed in his closet and of his 
desire to keep them there. They were the curses 
that he had left after endowing the lower crea- 
tures with their various gifts. But one day, in 
his absence, her curiosity overcame her and she 
slipped to the jar to see what was actually in it. 
That was enough. The lid was hardly open be- 
fore out flew the plagues that have since been the 
curse of the human race, — gout, rheumatism, 
chills and fevers for the body, and envy, spite, 
malice and revenge for the mind. 

She did, however, manage to shut the lid in time 
to keep in one thing, — a blessing that had been 
overlooked, and that blessing was hope, the price- 
less possession of the whole human race. Hope 
has been called the poor man's bread, but hope is 
the manna that feeds the race. Go where you 



A SPRIG OF EVERGREEN 4.9 

will, question whom you may, you will discover 
that the propelling motive of all activity is hope. 
It is the altar that is always crowded. 

Ask the little boy as he toddles off the first 
morning to school, with his plump little face and 
his clean little hands, what it is that takes him 
there and his eyes will tell you, if his tongue will 
not, that it is hope, the hope of a stronger mind. 
Ask the apprentice as he sweats at the forge and 
reddens at the hearth what it is that keeps him in 
that pandemonium of rattling steel and molten 
iron, and he will tell you by his movements, if his 
lips will not, that it is hope that keeps him there, 
hope of the mastery of his craft. Go take your 
stand where the immigrants land and ask them 
why they turned their backs on all that the hu- 
man heart holds dear, and the eagerness of their 
faces, the vivacity of their vernacular, the sturdy 
grasp on their bundles, declare in language that 
all men understand that hope has brought them 
here. 

Hope fills every sail that skims the sea. It 
guides the birds in their migrations. It fills the 
prisoner's cell with light. It is the star that 
shines on every pathway, the breeze that kisses 
every brow. Men may rob us of our gold, armies 
may deprive us of our homes and sickness may 
filch from us our health, but there is a birthright 
that no force on earth can take from us, the birth- 
right of our hope. We can hope even though his- 
tory mocks us and prophecy assures us nothing. 



50 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

We are so constituted, thanks to a loving heavenly 
Father, that even though we have nothing stead- 
fast to fix our hope upon, we can still find pleas- 
ure in indulging in the delusions of hope. 

There are many whose pathway is strewn with 
wrecked fortunes, lost prestige, ruined loves, shat- 
tered health, who heroically plod on in the fond 
delusion that somewhere the road will bend and 
open up to them a grander life than that they 
once possessed. Poor, sad gentry of the broken 
heart, how well it is that their souls can feed upon 
" the substance of things hoped for and the evi- 
dence of things not seen." But it is not of earth's 
varying or fleeting hopes that we wish to speak. 
Our text brings before our attention " the hope 
which is laid up for you in heaven." It turns our 
attention from the rainbow allurements of this 
world to the eternal realities of the other, from 
time and change, with its ceaseless ebb and flow, 
to that higher orb where aeons melting into aeons 
never blast a single joy. 

And what is that hope laid up for you in 
heaven? One of the hopes is the hope of ideal 
conditions. How full is this world of injustice 
and greed! There is hardly a hamlet, city or 
town in the world where human lives are not being 
crushed to feed the greed of sinful men. In 
hardly anything else do the poets and seers so 
universally agree as they do in this ; against noth- 
ing else are they so strong in their denunciation. 

Hood shows it in the song of the shirt. Pic- 



A SPRIG OF EVERGREEN 51 

turing a woman in a dingy attic, plying her 
needle and thread with weary fingers and heavy 
eyes that men might profit and gorge with wealth, 
he exclaims in fierce denunciation: 

" O men with loving sisters, 

O men with mothers and wives, 
It is not the linen you're wearing out 

But human creatures' lives. 
Stitch — stitch — stitch 

In poverty, hunger, and dirt. 
Sewing at once with a double thread 

A shroud as well as a shirt." 

Whittier shows it in the '' Prisoner for Debt." 
There was an old man cast into prison for a small 
debt and shared his ceU and bed with a murderer. 

" Just God, why lies that old man there ? 

A murderer shares his bed. 
Whose eyeballs through his horrid hair 

Gleam on him fierce and red." 

From the poem we learn that the old man had 
dropped some of his blood on Bunker Hill and 
Whittier justly sneers at the patriotism that 
shouts for freedom and lets patriots rot. Mark- 
ham shows the same resentment against the eco- 
nomic oppression of our present system of society 
in his " Man with the Hoe." 

Since woman is the chief sufferer, the men of 
heart and brain are bringing the chivalry of King 
Arthur's knights down to date. They are plung- 



52 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

ing into literature and politics as the ancient war- 
riors plunged into the forest, and are doing much 
to relieve the oppressed and punish the oppressor. 
Yet much that pains the heart remains and will no 
doubt for many years to come ; for greed is hydra- 
headed. In heaven that spirit will not be found. 
The oppressor, with all that defiles, will be outside. 

Men have tried to establish ideal conditions 
here on earth. The early church did it when its 
members sold their possessions and tried to live 
on terms of fraternal equality and unlimited trust, 
but it failed. The Brook Farm experiment was 
another and more recent attempt, but it failed too. 
Plato's "Republic," Moore's "Utopia," Bella- 
my's " Looking Backward " all tried to show the 
world the ideal way of living and their suggestions 
are as beautiful as the colors of the rainbow, 
beautiful enough to make the world a heaven. 
But the world read them, exclaimed " Excellent," 
and passed on to crush and grind and maul for 
gold as before the books were written. 

What a treasure is the hope of a better life in 
heaven to those who are oppressed, those who help 
to dye the garments they weave with their own 
blood. The sure knowledge that in the other 
world God's children shall be free and know no 
service but the service of love is the richest spring 
along life's flinty pathway. Equally precious is 
the hope to those whose sympathies go out to 
those who suffer, the rare, heroic souls who weep 



A SPRIG OF EVERGREEN 53 

with those who weep and give themselves a living 
sacrifice to the cause of the poor. 

Another hope that is laid up for you in heaven 
is the hope of clearer understanding. Here we 
see through a glass darkly, both each other and 
our God. 

It is said that the late Prof. Blackie, one of 
Scotland's educational idols, one day rebuked a 
boy for lifting his left hand while at the black- 
board. The professor had told his boys always 
to raise the right hand upon completing work at 
the board. This the offending lad had heard. 
" The other hand," said Professor Blackie, as he 
saw the boy's left hand go up. The boy pulled 
down the hand and started to lift the right elbow 
but stopped and put the left hand up again. 
Louder than before and in a tone that indicated 
temper the professor said, " I said the right 
hand, sir." The boy with a bashful flush pulled 
the stump from his right pocket and said, " I hae 
nae right hand. Professor." The professor, 
crushed with the pitiful answer, went up to the 
boy and, putting his arm on his shoulder, said, 
" My bairn, I dinna ken, I dinna ken." 

Oh, how much suffering could be avoided if we 
only knew ! How many unkind words would re- 
main unsaid, how many cruel deeds remain un- 
done! 

A romping boy, one night, the fourth time ig- 
noring his father's " Now be quiet," was sent 



54 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

unkissed and unblessed to bed. The room was 
quiet then. The father took up his paper, the 
mother her sewing. But after a space they 
caught each other gazing at the wall. " Why 
don't you read.'^ " said mother. " Why don't you 
sew.'' " said father. Presently he threw the paper 
aside and stole up the stairway himself. As he 
leaned over his boy he saw that his eyes were shut 
but his lashes wet. He kissed him then and lay 
down beside him and that night two bad boys 
were in that bed. Poor father, he did not know, 
he did not understand how hard it is for a boy to 
be quiet and climb disgraced the attic stairs alone. 

Many years before this father misunderstood 
his boy, a boy misunderstood his father. The re- 
straints of home were too strong for him and he 
said one day, " Father, I'm going away." The 
father let him go and gave him a goodly purse 
with which to pay his expenses while abroad and 
come back home, if perchance, he should weary of 
the land of strangers. But his son was extrava- 
gant and spent all that he had and in the course of 
time was in rags. Then he came unto himself, 
then he understood the goodness of his father's 
heart and the shelter of his father's house. But 
alas, he was sitting among swine and feeding upon 
their husks. The fool and the swine soon mess 
together. 

Half the nettles in our pillows are grown on 
the bushes of misunderstanding. The boy does 
not understand the reason for his father's sever- 



A SPRIG OF EVERGREEN 55 

itj and goes away to rue his folly ; the father does 
not understand the boy's romping noise and turns 
aside to mourn his impatience. 

How beautiful the hope that assures us of a 
place where we shall know as we are known, where 
in the crystal clearness of eternal day the spec- 
tres of doubt and suspicion, misunderstanding 
and mistrust shall be dissolved. It lures us as the 
music of a dream. 

How good it seems to have a misunderstanding 
adjusted even here. The whole atmosphere seems 
to be clarified as by the ozone following a storm, 
and even though the clouds of the sky lower over 
us we feel the exuberance of a sunny summer 
morn. If it gives such pleasure to have misun- 
derstandings cleared here on earth, what must be 
the rapture awaiting us there, where the mist shall 
be lifted and the doubt dissolved forever .^^ It will 
seem to some like the warm summer sun to a miner 
after an imprisonment in the mines, like the break 
of day after a night's groping in a tangled forest. 

Another hope laid up for you in heaven is the 
hope of eternal zest. 

Here the happiest man has his periods of de- 
pression, the strongest mind its seasons of lan- 
guor. There come into all lives times when the 
firm grasp on things becomes weak and nervous, 
periods when we almost wish we were any person 
but the person we are. The perpetual travel of 
the human race bears witness to this fact. Men 
of America run to Europe to catch new zeal and 



56 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

come back re-made. Men of Europe run to Amer- 
ica on a similar purpose. Men of the north, 
growing weary of the grind, take a trip to the 
south ; the men of the south come north. And 
those who have not the money with which to pay 
for a journey find their substitute for travel in a 
book. Almost all the reading of fiction, when re- 
duced to its ultimate analysis, is simply the mind's 
way of forgetting its weary plodding and seeking 
refreshment in the doings of another. 

Kings feel the satiety as well as their subjects, 
the stars of the stage as well as their admirers, the 
clowns of the circus as well as those who laugh at 
their antics. The one sometimes thinks that the 
other knows it not, but they have only to ask each 
other to discover that they are brethren. 

The boy looks up at the millionaire and feels 
sure that if he had the money that he has he would 
eat ice cream three times a day and have a private 
soda fountain in his office. The millionaire, with 
the money but no stomach, looks at the boy and 
says : 

" Blessings on thee^ my little man, 

Bare-foot boy with cheeks of tan, 
With thy merry whistled tunes 

And thy turned up pantaloons, 
With thy red lips, redder still 

Kissed by strawberries on the hill; 
From my heart I wish thee joy, — 

I was once a barefoot boy." 



A SPRIG OF EVERGREEN 57 

Thus it runs. The slough of satiety is the place 
where king and peasant meet. 

But there is a land where the spirit never ebbs, 
where the interest never lags, where every moment 
is supreme. How it is possible we do not know, 
but as heaven itself is a miracle we have no diffi- 
culty in believing that feature of its life. 

We do know that when an object sufficiently 
strong is placed before us it can absorb our atten- 
tion and keep languor away for a very long period 
of time. 

A monk of the middle ages, wondering how the 
Psalmist's thousand years of the Lord could be 
as a day, according to an ancient legend, went into 
the woods one day to ponder upon the mystery. 
There he heard birds singing with such ineffable 
sweetness that he lost all thought, for a long time, 
of anything but the music. Looking up after hav- 
ing listened long and intently, he saw the purple 
shades of twilight appear against the sky and 
went back to the monastery to his brethren. But 
he was a stranger among strangers. The only fa- 
miliar things he saw were the grim old monastery 
walls. While trying to unravel the mystery and 
locate himself, one of the monks brought him an 
ancient record containing the names of all the 
monks who had lived there in the past, and lo, he 
discovered that he had left the monastery a thou- 
sand years before and that all his brethren were 
dead. He had discovered through the entrancing 



58 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

music of the birds how it is possible for a thou- 
sand years to be as a day. 

It is but a legend, but it tells a truth. Place 
before the mind something sufficiently strong and 
you can hold it any length of time, without an in- 
different or languid moment. God has in store 
for us enough to keep us interested with the in- 
tensest rapture through eternity. O blessed hope 
laid up for us in heaven ! I would not give it up 
for all the wealth of all the world ! I would not 
surrender it for the earth, were it one entire and 
perfect diamond and I great enough to wear it ! 
It lures me as the ocean lures the river, it calls me 
as the southland calls the birds ! 

Another hope laid up for you in heaven is the 
hope of recovery. 

While life has much to give it has also much to 
ask. Time is a most insistent beggar. From the 
time that the child cries for its lost toy until the 
old man follows his last friend to the grave, life is 
one succession of surrenders. The years strip us 
of our friends as Autumn winds denude the trees. 

In the midst of the process our minds often be- 
come the battling ground of conflicting emotions. 
Sometimes, when the homesick feeling for a long 
lost friend becomes acute, we exclaim with Job of 
old, " Oh that I were as in months past ! " The 
heart almost breaks for the sound of the voice that 
is hushed and the touch of the hand that is still. 
But when the thought of the necessity of going 
through it all again occurs, should the dear ones 



A SPRIG OF EVERGREEN 59 

return, we are more likely to exclaim with David, 
" Oh that I had the wings of the dove, then would 
I fly away and be at rest." We all know the rest- 
less homesick feeling that tells us of our loss and 
points us to the place of restoration. 

Longfellow, after the death of his wife, strolls 
out at midnight on the bridge that spans the river 
and as he sees, in the moonlight, the seaweed com- 
ing in with the tide and going out again, a flood 
of tears streams over his face and he cries from 
the depth of his broken heart : 

" How often, oh, how often 

Have I wished that the ebbing tide 

Would bear me away on its bosom 
O'er the ocean wild and wide." 

To each and all 

" There comes a time when with earth's best loves 
by us 

To satisfy the heart's great hunger and desire, 
Not even this can satisfy us : 

The heart within us calls for something higher." 

In heaven that unnamed longing will find its 
satisfaction. All losses will be recovered, all 
broken links of aff^ection restored; the child will 
be given back to her mother, the mother to her 
child. 

One of the saddest moments for an American 
tourist going to Europe alone is the moment the 
ship glides into the port on the other side and re- 



60 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

ceives the salutations of the eager, anxious faces 
and hands awaiting there. The sadness comes 
not from the sight of land, for all the tourists are 
glad for that, nor at the sight of the happy re- 
unions, but from the thought that in all that mul- 
titude of waving hands and kerchiefs there is none 
for him. He is sailing from the charted sea of 
water into an unknown sea of laughing faces that 
care as little for him as the foaming billows for 
the keel. 

But the sadness incident to landing on the other 
side of the Atlantic will not be felt when we land 
on the tropical shore of heaven. When the ship 
that carries us up from this little world of ours 
glides unto the placid harbor of heaven, there'll be 
some one waiting for us there. I sometimes think 
the splendor of our western sky is but the mingled 
radiance of our loved ones' faces looking earth- 
ward. The sun, it seems to me, could not throw 
such glory there. 

Oh yes, we are homeward bound ; we are not 
travelling toward a foreign shore, and we have a 
hope laid up for us in heaven because it is our 
home. 



HOW HE SENDS US 

" As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you." 

John 20:21. 

The statues of Buddha represent him sitting, 
tailor fashion, with hands folded and eyes closed. 
The pictures of Jesus almost invariably represent 
him in action. The difference is the difference of 
the two religions. Buddhism is Memnon, Chris- 
tianity is the Nile. One sits, the other moves. 

Christianity could not be otherwise and be true 
to its founder, for He said, " I am come that ye 
might have life," " I go to prepare a place for 
you," " Come unto Me," " Go ye therefore and 
make disciples of all the nations." He was the 
wandering Jew, condemned by the eternal com- 
pulsions of love to an undying activity. He could 
no more rest than the creation which He and the 
Father made, no more stop than the succession of 
seed-time and harvest. Even what seemed to be 
rest was mental preparation for more work, a lac- 
ing of the sandals for another journey. 

Let us learn our duty by studying our Lord in 
action. If He sends us as He was sent, we can 
only understand the meaning of our mission as 
Christians by trying to grasp the meaning of His. 

How did the Father send Jesus? 

61 



62 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

He sent Him, first of all, with His consent. 
Milton's conception of God putting the ruin of the 
race before the heavenly host and telling them 
that it was necessary for some one to go down and 
make the sacrifice to ransom the race and of Jesus 
reverently, amid the silence of the angels, volun- 
teering to go, may not be literally true, — it may 
not have happened that way, but it is psycholog- 
ically true. 

God sent, Christ consented. Forgetting those 
two related facts has led to much confusion. 
" God so loved the world that He gave His only 
begotten son " ; Christ so loved that He laid down 
his life for his sheep. God's command was 
Christ's choice. 

Charlemagne misunderstanding this essential in 
Christian service had his whole army driven into 
the river and baptized en masse, thinking to make 
them Christians forthwith. But if you would 
have scratched those Christians you would have 
found a heathen under every epidermis. Where 
there is no consent there is no discipleship. 
Christ never coerced any one. He sends us as 
God sent Him, with our consent or not at all. 

How did the Father send Jesus? 

He sent him in weakness. Mythology tells us 
of Hera springing full-grown from the head of 
Zeus. The ancients may have thought such an 
origin necessary for prestige, but that is not 
God's way of doing things. When He wanted the 
law-giver of the ages He made him little enough 



HOW HE SENDS US 63 

to put in a basket. When He wanted the greatest 
of all poets He made him small enough to hold in 
two hands. When He wanted the Redeemer of 
the world He made a little child, too feeble to lift 
a hand, too weak to open an eye. The only man 
He ever made big from the start was Adam and 
he was a failure. Christ came the weakest of the 
weak, having emptied himself and made himself 
poor that we through his poverty might be rich. 

So He sends us. If we are not willing to go in 
weakness He does not want us to go at all, because 
" when w^e are weak then are we strong." The 
person who is so full of himself that there is no 
room for Christ is as impotent as an uncharged 
wire. It is only when the current comes from the 
dynamo and completely possesses every atom of 
the wire that the little thread shines. The little 
thread filled with power gives more light than all 
the cables of the Brooklyn bridge. 

Here is where many of us fail. We are unwill- 
ing to be sent because we are weak. That is the 
very reason why we should go, for " his strength 
is made perfect in weakness." The Lord can't use 
an egotist. Who was it who swept three thousand 
souls into the kingdom of God with one sermon, 
establishing a record that has never been equalled 
or dangerously approached? It was Peter. And 
who was Peter? The man who betrayed his Lord, 
who sank in the sea, who cut off the ear of the 
high priest's servant ; weak in temptation, weak in 
reserve, weak in discrimination. 



64 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

It does not matter from what your weakness 
comes or how utterly weak your weakness may be, 
Christ wants to use you at once as his ambassa- 
dor. Are you illiterate? Billy Bray could 
neither read nor write, yet he shook Wales in a 
revival as the forest-levelling storm shakes the 
mountain pines ; worse than that, he shook Wales 
as the earthquake shakes the solid earth, for the 
Welsh revival was a miner's revival and deep down 
under the mountains miners fell on their knees and 
implored God for forgiveness. Are you poor? 
Penniless Paul did more for the world than all the 
millionaires of the world. 

" The riches of a commonwealth 

Are free, strong minds and hearts of health, 
And more to her than gold or grain 

The cunning hand and cultured brain." 

Are you infirm? Christmas Evans was blind in 
one eye, Fanny Crosby blind in both eyes. A 
Philadelphia saint, bed-ridden for years, conducts 
a Sunday School by correspondence that encircles 
the globe. She goes to all nations and preaches 
the gospel to all peoples though she cannot walk 
ten feet across the floor. 

No, if your life is useless and your page in the 
Lamb's book of life blank it is because you are 
unwilling. Weakness is no excuse, for God has 
always used the weak things to confound the 
mighty. 

How did the Father send Jesusf 



HOW HE SENDS US 65 

He sent him into the world. The meteor comes 
sizzling down into the earth, a celestial bouquet 
thrown at the earth by some passing courtier, but 
Christ came into the world, the world of people. 
He was bom in a stable filled with people ; his first 
breath was from the steamy atmosphere of many 
breaths. His whole life was spent among people. 
He w^ound in and out among them as the stream 
winds in and out among the fields, refreshing and 
vitalizing everywhere. He permeates the masses 
as the sunshine permeates the earth, flooding the 
saints as sunshine floods the hills and piercing the 
sinners as sunbeams pierce the dungeon. 

There was none of the hermit in Jesus, except 
that soul-hermitage to which man can withdraw 
even in the crowd and " eat of that meat which the 
world knows not of." But as for going and living 
alone as the early Christians did, there was none 
of that either in Christ's conduct or his teaching. 

You laugh at old Stylites on top of his pillar, 
and smile indulgently at the old monks who slept 
on boards, ate gruel and wore coarse garments. 
But if your religion is confined to the church and 
consists only in coming to the church you are 
more useless than they were. They left a heritage 
of reverence and devotion behind ; you will not. 

Christ does not want saints in niches. He 
wants them on highways. When Cromwell came 
into a cathedral and saw a number of statues in 
alcoves in the walls, he said to an officer, " What 
are those things "^ " The officer replied, " They 



66 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

are disciples." " Then," said Cromwell, " pull 
them down and mint them into coins and let them 
go about doing good as disciples ought to do." 
Cromwell had his hand on the pulsating heart of 
Christianity when he spoke those words. 

God sent Christ into the world of people, not 
the good and the cultured, the world of all kinds of 
people, the good, the bad, the indifferent, the 
swearing, the adulterous, the deceitful, and the 
multitude followed him " as the heaped waves of 
the Atlantic follow the moon." 

So Christ sends us. He wants us to be as close 
to people as we are to Him. And we must be to 
be useful. To make an auto useful its wires must 
have two perfect contacts. The contact must be 
perfect at the magneto, where the electric current 
is made. It must be perfect also at the spark 
plug, where the current is discharged into the 
cylinder. A poor contact is as bad at one end 
as at the other. There are many people who have 
a good contact with the magneto ; at least when 
you hear them pray you would think so ; but they 
have no contact with the world whatever. Their 
grip on the throne is good but the other end of the 
wire is dangling in the air. 

That is what lost Africa to the Christian world 
for almost two thousand years. The church 
fathers at Alexandria spent their time discussing 
doctrines and forgot to go out into the highways 
and hedges, and so Africa became the dark conti- 
nent. Europe and America would be as dark to- 



HOW HE SENDS US 67 

day if they had received the same treatment. God 
sent Christ into the world and so He sends you. 
Go, and do not be content to be little alabaster 
saints in temple niches. All the sinning and suf- 
fering and sorrowing are on the outside. 

How did the Father send Jesus? 

He sent him alone. " Oh," you say, " the an- 
gels attended his birth and the angels attended 
him in his temptation and in his agony. He also 
had the company of the disciples." Yes, He had 
their company and still He was alone. Look at 
the mother who is gazing silently into the face of 
her dead child. Do you mean to tell me that she 
is not alone, because the neighbors are with her? 
Look at the father as he sits in the court room, 
behind his son on trial for life. Do you mean to 
say that he is not alone, because the court room 
is full of people? Ah, there is ground which no 
one can tread with us. In our deepest experiences 
we never come closer together than ships that pass 
in the night in mid-ocean ; messages may fly back 
and forth between us and we may catch faint 
glimpses of each other's deck lights, but each goes 
it alone, ploughing a separate path and churning 
a separate foam. 

Though Christ was a man of the crowds and 
had his little college of apostles with him most of 
the time, his oft-repeated " O ye of little faith ! " 
shows what loneliness He felt. We must expect 
that same loneliness. The world receives not the 
things of the spirit. Christian wives must expect 



68 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

dull ears from unchristian husbands ; Christians 
of mature piety must expect dullness from the un- 
developed. The price of maturity has always 
been loneliness. 

Who is Edison's comrade, who is Burbank's 
peer.f^ They have none. Nowhere does loneli- 
ness come quicker than in religion. 

But Christ was alone also in his utterances. 
When Hillel or Gamaliel or Shimmei spoke they 
reminded their hearers of others. When Christ 
spoke He spoke as man never spoke before. He 
did it primarily because He was the incarnation 
of God but He did it also because He expressed 
himself without any thought or concern for previ- 
ous or contemporaneous utterances of others. 

To ignore all who went before us is to assume 
that wisdom was born in our generation, which is 
not true ; and to ignore the opinions of our con- 
temporaries is to assume that wisdom is lodged in 
us, which is just as fallacious; but to try to find 
for everything we say an endorsement in some 
previous oracle is slavery as abject as that of Is- 
rael in Egypt. 

Christ was aware of the prophets ; they were his 
text books as a child ; but He used them as the 
rosebush uses the soil. From the ground up He 
was himself. So ought you to be. God made no 
two faces alike, no two hearts, no two experiences. 
Each has therefore a different story to tell, which 
unless told by him will never be told. And He 
expects each to tell his story as naturally as the 



HOW HE SENDS US 69 

rose breathes out its fragrance and the linnet its 
song. Tell your story, if it be but a single sen- 
tence. The Greek herald, who came running over 
the dusty miles from the battle shouting " Vic- 
tory ! " as he entered the city and falling dead at 
his countrymen's feet, said more than many an 
hour's oration. God sent Christ to tell his own 
story and He gave Him a life so different from all 
others that it had the charm of the first morning 
in Eden. He sends us the same way and gives us 
each a unique and winning story to tell. Will we 
tell it or leave it forever untold.^ 

How did the Father send Jesus into the world? 

He sent Him to suffer. Ah, here's the rub. 
We are perfectly willing to extol the bleeding sac- 
rifice of Calvary and praise the martyrs who went 
to the Colosseum, the stake and the gibbet, but 
when our turn comes to suffer we want ether. 
There is no Christianity, however, without suffer- 
ing. Christ said, " For this cause came I into the 
world " and '* As my Father hath sent Me into 
the world, even so send I you." 

The path to every blessing is stained with blood. 
The lintels and door-posts of every life, whether it 
be the life of a child or a nation, are streaked with 
blood. Around an old oak cut down in England 
some years ago was a circle of skeletons and every 
head was cut in twain, recalling the days of the 
battle axe and the spear. They died that Eng- 
land might live. In the National Cemetery at 
Gettysburg there are a thousand unknown dead, 



70 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

while scarcely a summer passes without bringing 
a few bones and a few buttons to light. They 
died that America might live. History is first 
written in blood, then in ink. And the richer the 
blessing the deeper the crimson. With a few 
stings of the wind the hunter brings you his game 
but redemption is passed on through crucified 
hands from the beginning. 

Had all been as willing to bear in their body the 
marks of the Lord as they are to bear on their 
lips his praises, society would long since have been 
redeemed from its ancient plagues and the church, 
adorned as a bride, would be ready for her heav- 
enly spouse. The curse of the church is the un- 
willingness of her members to suffer. Perfectly 
respectable business men who would not touch a 
drop of liquor themselves, through fear of losing a 
few dollars' worth of trade will do nothing openly 
against the saloon. Intellectual and cultured 
ministers who recoil from injustice as they recoil 
from a raised serpent, through fear of losing their 
pulpits refuse to condemn the exploitation of the 
rich capitalists in their pews. 

Fie on such religion ! When Nathan stood be- 
fore David and condemned him by parable he 
added pungency to the parable by saying, " Thou 
art the man." When Garibaldi was thrown into 
jail, he exclaimed, " Though fifty Garibaldis be 
thrown into prison, let Rome be free." When the 
European war broke out the German clergymen 
immediately took steps to have the law excluding 



HOW HE SENDS US 71 

them from military service revoked, contending 
that if all other professions have the honor of 
fighting for their country they ought to have it 
too. 

Many sing " Onward, Christian Soldiers " who 
are nothing but dishwashers. Brethren, the 
sword of the Lord and of Gideon was more than a 
table knife. It was something that invited death 
for the holder as well as the foe. Up and to arms, 
ye who claim to be followers of the Captain of our 
salvation ! You must do good as well as be good 
and you must bear in your body the marks of the 
Lord. If we suffer with Him we shall also reign 
with him. If we follow him afar off and hide be- 
hind trees He will deny that He ever knew us. 

How did the Father send Jesus into the world? 

He sent Him to seek and to save the lost. " As 
my Father hath sent me, even so send I you." 
How many have we sought, how many have we 
found? Oh, it is easy to seek as a child seeks 
mittens and caps, with a glance here and a glance 
there and then a skip and away without them. 
But that is not the way Christ wants us to seek 
the lost. He wants us to seek until we have found. 

When Bennett sent Stanley to find Livingstone, 
he said to Stanley, " Draw on me for a thousand 
pounds, and when you have gone through that 
draw on me for another thousand, and when you 
have spent that draw another and then another, 
but find Livingstone." And so he went, through 
jungle and swamp, through fever and poison, until 



7^ RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

he found Livingstone in the heart of Africa. 
Twenty-three times fever laid him low ; forty con- 
secutive miles he walked through water ; dangers 
indescribable he met on every side, but he found 
his man. 

Our commission is like Stanley's. We can 
draw upon Christ whenever we need him. " Lo, I 
am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world." " My grace is sufficient for thee." Are 
we finding our men.^^ 

Oh, the tragedy of a childless home ! Oh, the 
double tragedy of a childless religion ! Eliza Ag- 
new, the girls' school missionary for forty-one 
years in Ceylon, was called the mother of a thou- 
sand daughters. She will have more to present 
to the King of all kings than the Roman matron 
who was asked to show her jewels. 

How is it with you, my brother, sister.^ 

When Nadine Boulitchoff, the great Russian 
singer, completed her engagement in Brazil she 
announced that she would give a benefit night for 
the emancipation of slave women. At the con- 
clusion of the last song the audience burst into 
deafening applause. But that was not the thing 
that delighted the soul of the great singer. The 
thing that made her happy was the sight of a 
dozen slave women pushing their way up to the 
platform and falling with tear dimmed e^'^es and 
clasped hands before her. She had made them 
free and they were there to praise her. 



HOW HE SENDS US 73 

Oh, how many will there be who will thank us 
up yonder for what we have done. 

" Must I go and empty handed, 

Must I meet my Saviour so? 
Not one soul with which to greet Him^ 

Must I empty handed go? " 

God forbid ! 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 

A MOTHER'S DAY SERMON 

" His mother made him a little coat." 

I Samuel 3:19. 

Poetry is the language of love and without it 
poetry would die, for philosophy, history, science 
and law are best expressed in prose. The sublim- 
est poetry, therefore, is that which reveals the 
divinest love, and that which reveals the divinest 
love is the poetry that will live. It is because of 
the burning love throbbing through their poems 
that Burns and Moore and Longfellow and Poe 
are bound to survive the memory of their contem- 
poraries. While the polished jingles of the pas- 
sionless rhymsters pass out of sight, like the flick- 
ering candle dying in its socket, " Evangeline," 
with its pitiful tale of parted lovers, " Annabel 
Lee," with its tender tribute to the dead, " Enoch 
Arden," with its love that gives up all for the 
happiness of the loved, will go on their flaming 
way like planet-circled suns. 

But the sublimest poetry on earth is not that 
which the poets wrote. It is that which mothers 
sewed into little garments. As the love of woman 
surpasses that of man, so do the poems of the nee- 
dle surpass the poems of the pen. There is more 

74 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 75 

love stitched into the little skirts and coats of 
children than ever foundl its way into ancient 
scrolls or modern books. 

The mother to whom our text refers is one of 
the innumerable household laureates who had a 
little boy and loved him. Like a faithful Jewish 
mother, she dedicated him to the Lord and com- 
mitted him to the service of Eli the prophet. Go- 
ing once a year with her husband up to Shiloh, 
where Eli the prophet and the little boy were, she 
took with her, usually, a little coat which her own 
hands had made. That coat, however, antedates 
the assembling of the cloth. When little Samuel 
lived there were no stores in which to buy one's 
cloth and thread. Each household made its own. 
The mother of Samuel was, therefore, hardly back 
from her annual visit to Shiloh before she began 
the supervision of the next year's coat. She of 
course very soon selected the sheep from which the 
wool was to be taken and kept the shepherds con- 
stantly in mind. She doubtless also, when shear- 
ing time arrived, washed the wool and bleached it 
by itself, and when spinning time came she held the 
distaff and spindle with her own hands. She 
watched the sheep, she prepared the wool, she 
made the coat, she took it to him and put it on 
him, then hugged the coat, the boy and all as only 
a mother can. 

From this little coat, so insignificant beside the 
pomp of kings and pageantry of empires, yet so 
much greater than all, because born of a higher 



76 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

love, we shall draw our sermon. We shall roll that 
little coat up into a prism and with it analyze the 
love that shines through it. That little coat tells 
us more eloquently than a poet's pen could ever 
hope to tell us, the constituents of a mother's love. 
It is a matter of comment that a mother's love is 
the most beautiful thing on earth, but we shall 
never know its beauty until we see the color bands 
it throws. 

Looking at it on the other side of the coat, 
where its hidden glory is spread out, we see first 
of all the broad red band of consecration. 

Red is the color of blood and blood is the ink of 
service. With it soldiers have written history on 
mountain ledge and valley stream, on prairie grass 
and desert sands ; with it martyrs have written 
their heroism in Colosseum and city square, ex- 
plorers their bravery in jungle glades and arctic 
snows. The records have disappeared from the 
pages that received them, but the heat of judg- 
ment will bring them out as fire restores a hidden 
message and they will tell the stories of earth's 
great deeds as historians never told them. Get- 
tysburg and Waterloo and Crecy and Chalon, 
Bannockburn and Hastings will make the records 
of the pen seem cold as chiselled steel. And what 
a tale will Calvary unfold, — that little knoll that 
holds the price of our redemption. 

But red blood is more than the ink of consecra- 
tion. It is also the wealth of a country. Bank- 
ers reckon the value of a country by its silver and 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 77 

gold, its houses and lands ; but the sage of Con- 
cord said, 

" One drop of noble manly blood 
The surging seas outweigh/' 

and a little thought shows the sage to be right. 
The countries that have blessed the world have 
been little Palestine in the stony Jordan valley, 
little Greece in the hilly heel of Europe, little 
Rome in the narrow plains of Campania, little 
England in the swirl of two pounding seas. The 
best part of America's contribution to the world 
came from little New England, where the gods of 
old scattered rocks for grain and forgot to reap 
their harvest. 

Blood has always been a nation's best asset, its 
richest treasure, its highest worth. And the blood 
of its mothers has been its purest gold. Who has 
ever forgotten the Spartan mother who told her 
son to come home with his shield or on it, or the 
Indian mother who in superstition threw her babe 
into the sacred, filthy Ganges, or the American 
mother who bent over her dying boy at Gettys- 
burg and said, " I yield him to his country and his 
God." 

It was the red blood of mother Washington that 
kept her boy from running off to sea, the red 
blood of mother Lincoln that breathed the forti- 
tude of the rocks and the uprightness of the trees 
into the soul of her growing boy. It was the 
true blood of countless thousands of noble moth- 



78 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

ers that gave us our soldiers, our reformers and 
our statesmen. And when we say this we are not 
referring to that vague, airy element that flows 
merely through one's personality. We talk of 
actual blood, the kind that throbs and stains and 
feeds. Drop for drop and pain for pain, mother- 
hood has soldiery outdistanced a thousand leagues. 

The soldier of the sword yields his blood under 
the inspiration of the multitude and the stirring 
strains of martial music. The soldier of the cra- 
dle, like Jacob at Peniel, fights her battles alone. 
For the soldier of the uniform there is abatement 
of suffering. Wars are less frequent than they 
used to be and of shorter duration. But mother- 
hood has the same battles to fight that it always 
fought and must fight them with the same intens- 
ity that it felt three thousand years ago. 

How strange that only now, after the long neg- 
lect of ages, mothers should be recognized as sol- 
diers and be given a little pension. May the day 
soon come when all worthy mothers will be amply 
protected and abundantly provided for by the 
state. A poverty-stricken mother is a disgrace 
to the state that has her as well as to the husband 
who left her. 

Next to the red of consecration I see, as I ex- 
amine a mother's love through this woolen prism 
of long ago, the orange of warm affection. Or- 
ange is suggestive of the tropics. Whether we see 
it on the fruit or the sign board, the pennant or 
the book, it takes our thoughts to the place where 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 79 

the sweet magnolias bloom and where the woods 
are always gay. It tells us of an atmosphere that 
clasps the earth with the warmth and ardor of a 
lover. 

Among God's creatures there is none in whom 
the ardor of affection is so tropically warm as in 
a mother. The warm blood of her heart sends life 
into the form of her unborn child, the warm press 
of her lips sends healing into the wounds of her 
bruised child, the warm breath of her soul sends 
thoughts into the mind of her plastic child, the 
warm beam of her eye sends cheer into the face of 
her bearded son. 

Through childhood and maturity she is the one 
unfailing sanatorium of all the cold world's bit- 
terest ailments. What she does is neither scien- 
tific nor philanthropic, as the records of men are 
kept, but she reaches suffering that the philan- 
thropist never dreams of and heals diseases that 
the scientist cannot touch. 

We wonder not that John Quincy Adams, at 
eighty, repeated nightly the little prayer that his 
mother taught him. It was like running into her 
arms again and hearing her old sweet lullabies, 
like gliding in from the storm and the tempest to 
the placid harbor of a blossoming isle. Nor do 
we wonder that Gray the poet asked to be buried 
beside his mother. There is nothing so comfort- 
ing to a little child as the knowledge that mother's 
head is near when the sleepy eyes begin to close. 
It is natural for us to feel that our sleep will be 



80 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

sweeter also in death if we can pillow our heads 
on the same pallet of clay. 

The flowers always turn toward the sun. They 
love the warm kiss of their mother. We are like 
them, and our hearts turn naturally toward the 
one who poured a whole soul's summer heat of 
love upon us. 

Next to the orange of affection I see, in this 
mother love spread out before me, the green of 
immortality. How easy it is for us to think we 
shall soon be forgotten when we are dead. How 
certain we feel that our days are rounded in the 
moil of common things. Pans and plates, socks 
and jackets, suds and grease, what pledges of im- 
mortality ! They mock the very effort of the 
orator who tries to prove it. 

But listen ! About thrice a thousand years ago 
there lived a mother whose lot was poorer than 
that of the poorest of you. She was a slave in 
the days when slavery was at its worst. Today 
she has the joint credit of controlling five hundred 
million people. There are at present over five 
hundred million people living under governments 
that have drawn their legal fundamentals from 
the Bible. Some in these governments are dis- 
posed to call the decalogue obsolete and indulge in 
a condescending smile when some of its homely 
phrases are repeated, but the fact remains that we 
essentially approve today what it approves and 
penalize what it penalized, — if not with the same 
condemnation, with the same exactness. 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 81 

The decalogue we call Mosaic, but before Moses 
was ready for the promptings of the Omniscient 
he had to take a long course of lessons from the 
one who bore him. If you want to know the in- 
fluence that that slave mother had upon the world, 
look at her son after his graduation from the uni- 
versity of On. Coming back to his foster mother's 
home, the palace of Pharaoh's daughter, he had 
before him two careers, one of royal splendor, the 
other of menial service. He could lead either 
princes or slaves. Which did he do ? " By faith 
Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be 
called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing 
rather to suffer affliction with the people of God 
than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season." 
Softly as the vernal breezes kiss the opening buds, 
that mother kissed the soul of Moses with high 
ideals, and when the summer time of manhood came 
he burst into the splendor of a tropical grove. 

Over in England there is a remarkable group 
of twenty-one colleges, known collectively as Ox- 
ford University. From its walls have come such 
men as Gladstone the statesman, Whitfield the 
preacher, Wycliffe the reformer, Ruskin the au- 
thor, Locke the philosopher, John Wesley the 
founder of Methodism, and his brother Charles the 
hymnologist. With Cambridge, it leads the uni- 
versities of the British Empire. During the 
colonization period it furnished unschooled Amer- 
ica with some of its choicest scholars and some of 
its profoundest divines. We say that Oxford 



82 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

sprang, a thousand years ago, from Alfred the 
Great but we trace the stream only a portion of 
the distance if we stop with Alfred. If you want 
to push your canoe up to the fountain of that 
mighty Amazon of learning you must go with me 
up to the home of Alfred's mother. 

One day when Alfred was a boy of twelve, with 
several brothers older than himself at home, his 
mother, the queen wife of Ecgbert, bought a little 
book with highly colored letters and gorgeous pic- 
tures and offered it to the boy who would first be 
able to read it. With a vim characteristic of all 
his actions, Alfred set about learning to read the 
book and acquired it as his prize. From that day 
dated Alfred's love of literature and passion for 
learning, and to that incentive given him by a 
thoughtful mother the great university of Oxford 
owes its existence today. It was only a little 
book, it was only a little boy, it was only a little 
act of love that brought the boy and the book to- 
gether, but it was the mountain lake that started 
the river. 

Oh, if there is a class of people on earth that 
can say, " We are laborers together with God," it 
is the class made up of those who mould the plastic 
clay of personality. 

Talmage said that when the two Wesleys ap- 
proach their throne in heaven they will find one 
in the middle, higher than either, for their mother. 
But the mother of the Wesleys is not the only 
mother who will share an equal or superior reward 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 83 

with her children. From the four points of the 
compass and from all the centuries there will be 
mothers of whom the world has never heard, com- 
ing up to glory, for crowns as resplendent as those 
of earth's most famous queens. By the side of 
Victoria, coming from the sacred halls of West- 
minster, will be Margaret, the mother of Luther, 
coming from the sacred dust of Mansf eld ; Monica, 
the mother of Augustine, coming up from Milan ; 
Betsey, the mother of Moody, coming from North- 
field, and others whose sons were only good but not 
illustrious. 

You must not be impatient, mother; you must 
not be discouraged. If your work is slow in ma- 
turing, so much grander is your work. The cathe- 
dral of Cologne, begun in 1248, was not finished 
until 1880. For a century at a time it was neg- 
lected; generations came and went without seeing 
one stone laid upon another ; often it deteriorated, 
but at last, in our own day, the cap-stone was 
placed upon it and the dream of the old architect, 
who died two hundred years before Columbus, was 
realized. You may close your eyes as the un- 
known architect, with your dream no more ful- 
filled than his was, but rest assured that some day 
in the sweet bye-and-bye it will be fulfilled. 
Though your boy fell in the morning of manhood 
and left you nothing but an aching heart, he left 
also an impress on half a hundred friends that in 
God's good time will bless the race. The one he 
saved may not become a potent factor and the one 



84 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

who is saved by the one he saved may go to an un- 
remembered grave, but some time in the next five 
centuries or more the spires of Cologne will rise 
and your work on the little coat will have its re- 
ward. 

The next color that the prism shows, after the 
green, is the blue, which stands for constancy. 
" As true as the blue " has long been a mosaic. I 
see that band also as I look through little Samuel's 
coat. 

No sin is great enough to quench the love of a 
mother. Though fathers go to the same length 
and depth to rescue or forgive a recreant son, 
there are, nevertheless, frequent instances in which 
a father's love, at least for a while, is exhausted. 
Having done all that a father could be expected 
to do and more than a son has a right to ask, hav- 
ing poured money upon him like water, and receiv- 
ing only ingratitude in return, he grits his teeth 
and turns his back. His attitude thereafter, save 
in such rare moments when the heart strings of 
sentiment are touched by some chance reference 
to the boy's innocent childhood, is that of a mer- 
chant to an agent. Love practically enters the 
relation no more. But with a mother it is differ- 
ent. Her heart is a fountain that never runs dry. 

When William Penn renounced the religion of 
his fathers, all his former friends save one for- 
sook him, his old companions mocked him, the 
priests denounced him, his father in anger turned 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S OOAT 85 

him penniless out of doors, but his mother re- 
mained and kept him from starving. 

Sir Walter Scott had a brother Dan, who taxed 
his mother's constancy more than William Penn. 
He was the black sheep of the flock, who ruined 
himself financially and morally through the ac- 
quaintance of a dissolute woman. So great was 
the dishonor that he brought upon the family name 
that Sir Walter neither attended his funeral nor 
wore mourning for him, and when he spoke of him 
he referred to him as a relative and not a brother. 
But the mother of the boys was not so. No 
mother ever was. 

Her arms, like the branch of the generous oak, 
are open for the recreant as well as the upright. 
" I will never leave thee nor forsake thee " is as 
true of her as of the One who uttered it on the 
green hills of Galilee, and there are thousands of 
mothers proving it every day by their ceaseless 
tread to the courthouse and the jail. What tests 
has a mother's love not been put to ! Never has it 
failed. It seems as fathomless as the sea, as im- 
measurable as the heavens. No matter what dis- 
ease or sin may do with her children, a mother's 
love is a mother's love still, the holiest thing alive. 
No matter what sin or disease may do with the 
mother herself, her mother love will not forsake 
her. 

Some time ago a woman went suddenly insane 
in New York city and was carried by her mania, 



86 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

like a beggar, through the streets. Her family, 
in spite of their shrewdest cunning, could neither 
induce her to stay at home nor enter an asylum. 
Finally after all other methods failed, one of them 
hired a messenger boy to intercept her with a tele- 
gram, informing her that her child was danger- 
ously ill at a hospital and that if she wished to see 
her child alive she should come at once. The ruse 
worked like a charm, and the woman who a moment 
before was walking the streets with reason de- 
throned was on her way to her own imprisonment. 
When old King Lear was met out in the storm- 
lashed forest, with hair dishevelled and garments 
drenched, and asked whether he was the king, he 
answered, " Aye, every inch a king ! " As we see 
this poor, wild-eyed creature hastening along with 
her mother love aglow for her child, we feel like 
answering, for her, to the world that imprisoned 
her, " Aye, every inch a queen ! " A creature 
whose love can flame up through the smouldering 
ashes of an exhausted mind is queenly indeed, 
" majestic though in ruins." 

But such is the stuff of which a mother's heart 
is made. When the Capitol at Washington was 
finished, they took the stones that were left and 
built a bridge across a creek between Washington 
and Georgetown. If there was any material left 
after the great white throne was made, it must 
have been put into motherhood, that bridge across 
life's turgid youth. 

After the blue in the prism's glory is the indigo. 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 87 

How suggestive indeed is the indigo band 
through this woolen prism of long ago. We have 
seen many bottles since we left the old back porch 
of our boyhood days, some of them dangling from 
the necks of qualmish women, some peeping from 
the pockets of sinful men, others nestling beside 
the pillowed heads of sleeping babes, but of all the 
bottles, plain or fancy, that our eyes have ever 
seen there is none that brings back such memories 
as the one that mother used for blueing. We 
thought little of it as her tired form bent over the 
tub while she stirred the waters with her hand. 
The playful hand of a fair young girl leaning over 
the boat was more attractive then. But how dif- 
ferent is it now as we walk with tender step the 
twilight path of memory ! 

The indigo band tells me of a mother's slavery. 
In ancient times slaves for life were branded or 
marked in the lobe of the ear with an awl. It 
sometimes happened that slaves who were in bond- 
age for only a certain term of years fell in love 
with some who were slaves for life and, to become 
their mates, submitted their ears to the master's 
awl. 

Oh, how many thousands of mothers bear the 
marks of such voluntary servitude ! You see it in 
the wrinkles of their forehead, in the tremble of 
their fingers, in the tell-tale hand that uncon- 
sciously seeks to soothe a rheumatic arm. The 
hardest worked slave of the most brutal tyrant 
had his period of rest and his hours of sleep ; the 



88 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

mother has no minute of time that she can coilnt 
upon as her own. Day and night, winter and sum- 
mer, hungry mouths and busy hands make unceas- 
ing demands upon her. 

In the servitude of man the sacredness of the 
body is respected. No drop of blood is drawn, 
no hair singed, no bone broken, and everything 
possible is done for the safety of those who serve. 
But the servitude of a mother's love holds nothing 
sacred except the thing adored. She cares no 
more for smallpox, if her child is stricken, than 
she does for measles. She lays her body, a living 
sacrifice, upon the altar and fears nothing. When 
pressed by poverty she gives everything she has to 
save her children. A mother recently walked into 
a hair dresser's store in Pittsburg and offered her 
wealth of hair for fifty dollars. Her brood was 
crying for bread and she was desperate. The 
hole in the ear was nothing compared to the stif- 
fened joints, the rattling lungs, the burning feet 
and the host of other physical ills that slaving 
mothers willingly endure. 

When the excavators unearthed Pompeii they 
came upon many strange, suggestive sights. The 
guard who stood unflinchingly at his master's door 
is classic ; the miser who ran back for his bag of 
gold and was found with it in his hand is also 
known ; but of all the suggestive sights unearthed 
there is none that breathes such tender consecra- 
tion as that which the diggers saw when they came 
upon the form of a little cripple boy sitting by a 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 89 

window. Around the neck of the boy was the 
arm of a woman. The body of the woman was 
gone ; it was consumed with the general devasta- 
tion ; but the arm that reached through the win- 
dow was still around her boy, though almost two 
thousand years had passed away. What that 
mother did every mother would do. 

Young man, when you are tempted to throw 
your life away for a syren's song, remember the 
vigils your fretting occasioned, the aching arms 
your tyranny made, the tired back on which you 
had no mercy. Your life is the result of over a 
thousand forgotten anxieties and over a thousand 
prayers. It was dearly bought and fully paid. 
Remember her who paid the greater portion of the 
price. If a thing is to be disposed of according 
to the price at which it was bought, you ought to 
dispose of your days and strength as a jeweler dis- 
poses of his gems. No greater service than your 
mother rendered you will you ever have, none who 
will go down into the depths and out into the 
lengths of service as she has. Think well as you 
look at the indigo band of your mother's loving 
service. 

Beyond the indigo in the prism's variegated 
glory lies the purple, tender and subdued. I see 
it also as I examine a mother's love through little 
Samuel's coat. The purple tells me of that silent 
love that sits and gazes at empty cribs and win- 
some faces on the wall ; the love that kisses little 
dishes and drops a tear or two on little orphaned 



90 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

dolls. It tells me of that love that looks toward 
the sunset and sees radiant faces behind it ; the 
love that travels often to the gates ajar and waves- 
to the one within them. 

Eugene Field in one of his tender moods de- 
scribes such a love in language no poet has ever 
surpassed. 

" After dear old grandma died, 
Hunting through an oaken chest 

In an attic we espied 

What repaid our childish quest: 

'Twas a homely little slate 
Seemingly of ancient date. 

" On its quaint and battered face 

Was the picture of a cart 
Drawn with all that awkward grace 

Which betokens childish art; 
But what meant this legend, pray: 

' Homer wrote this yesterday.^ ' 

" Mother recollected then 

What the years were fain to hide — 

Mother was a baby then, 

When little Homer lived and died; 

Forty years, so mother said, 
Little Homer had been dead. 

" This little slate through all the years 

Grandma kept from all apart, 
Hallowed by her lonely tears 

And the breaking of her heart; 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 91 

While each j^ear that sped away 
Seemed to her but yesterday." 

Forty years of separation leave a mother's love 
as verdant and as fragrant as the passing of a 
night and she still thinks of the little slate, the 
little shoes, the toys and trinkets, stowed away in 
bureau drawers and closet shelves, as things of 
yesterday. She hears the cooing of her babe and 
sees the sparkle of his eye, and ofttimes in her 
reverie draws him to her breast and sings again 
her lullabies, though twice a score of years have 
passed since she gave him back to God. 

What Homer's mother did every mother does. 
No matter how the passing years may fill her life 
with new associations, she always holds, deep down 
in the shady nooks of her heart, the fragrant 
violets of remembrance. There are mothers in 
every city, hamlet and town who are going as regu- 
larly to their little mounds as they did twenty 
years ago. No altars in all the world are ap- 
proached as frequently and as tenderly as those 
that rest upon the little forms of long ago. No 
matter who forgets us when we are gone, mother 
will not. Such a love as this is worth revering. 
It deserves more than respect. It is worthy of the 
veneration accorded the saints. 

Friend, if you still have a mother on earth, do 
everything for her that you can. If you are a boy 
or a girl at home, lighten her burden and smooth 
her pathway. Shoulders that have borne your 



92 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

weight through the restless years of childhood de- 
serve a rest from many of the slavish tasks that 
once were necessary. If your mother is one of 
the innumerable throng that makes more music in 
the kitchen than the parlor and habitually crowds 
the servant and the mistress in one gown, then 
despise yourself with all your heart if you still 
allow her to carry coal and do the chores she did 
of yore. 

That boy who lets his mother drag and drudge 
while he parades the dude isn't worth the heat it 
took to crease his trousers. That girl who lets 
her mother broil and burn while she enjoys the 
breezes on the porch isn't worth one pufF of the 
powder on her face. 

If you are a boy or girl grown large and have 
left the old homestead, remember that your mother 
is your mother still and that no matter what the 
world may call you or what honors it may pour at 
your feet, to her you are still her child. Give her 
reason to find an increasing pleasure in that feel- 
ing. It is her deepest and her richest joy. 

Write to her often. Clem Studebaker, the 
millionaire wagon manufacturer, called on his 
mother every morning when at home and sent her 
a daily telegram when away. It mattered not 
how far east or west he was, his mother always had 
a good morning from her boy. 

Remember her birthdays. She baked many a 
birthday cake for you and put more in it than 
the sugar and eggs that made them light. Treat 



LITTLE SAMUEL'S COAT 93 

her with the greatest consideration you can com- 
mand. When Garfield was sworn into office he 
turned to his mother and kissed her. Never was 
Garfield greater. Speak of her always with re- 
spect. Byron said, " My mother was my worst 
enemy. She was an ignorant, foolish woman, dis- 
agreeable in her appearance and violent in her 
temper." Byron dropped into the grave at 
thirty-six, saying, 

" My days are in the yellow leaf; 

The flower and fruit of love are gone; 
The worm^ the canker, and the grief 

Are mine alone." 

A fitting exit for a man who tramples his mother's 
name in the mire. 

Luther, who had as severe a mother as Byron 
and who was once flogged until the blood came for 
no greater offence than that of stealing a nut, 
said, " She often overstepped the bounds of moder- 
ation but she meant it well." Luther's swan song 
was, " Father, into thy hands I commend my 
spirit," — the swan song of Calvary. 

If your mother is gone and has taken her place 
in the sacred throng that is over the river, look- 
ing this way, honor her memory with the holiest 
reverence. When Goethe visited Frankfurt he 
sought out all who had been kind to his mother 
and personally thanked them. When Thaddeus 
Stevens made his will he set aside a thousand dol- 
lars for the care of his mother's grave. 



94 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

The veneration of sacred dust is a poor substi- 
tute for tenderness to living love, but if that is all 
that is left to you render it as priests burn incense 
at the altar. The holiest place on earth for you 
is the place that holds her precious form. Visit 
it often, go at twilight when the feverish haste of 
the day is past and the skies are tender and the 
birds at rest. It will lift you from your weakness 
and your sin and fill your soul with the ozone of 
the heavenly hills. 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 

"Why do the people imagine a vain thing?" 

Psalm 2:1. 

The world is full of dungeons on the ground. 
Scotland has her Dumbarton, where the doughty 
Wallace was kept in chains ; England has her 
Tower, where Anne Boleyn and Sir Walter 
Raleigh were beheaded ; France has her Bastille, 
where authors, priests and scholars were held so 
long in bondage that no man knew who they were 
or when they came ; Spain has her Seville, where 
dissenters were held in bondage previous to their 
burning; Switzerland has her Chillon, where the 
noble Bonivard spent six years chained to a pil- 
lar ; Venice has her Bridge of Sighs ; India, her 
Black Hole ; America, her Leavenworth, her Sing 
Sing and her Tombs. The face of the earth is 
pitted over with the smallpox of man's crime. 

On hills and in valleys, by sea coasts and by 

deserts, in city and forest, can be found dungeons 

used in the past or used today, some of them very 

young, some of them holding the secret groans of 

a thousand years. These things must needs be for 

the protection of society and the punishment and 

possible reformation of the criminal. 

There are, however, some dungeons that never 

95 



96 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

touched the earth. No mine was ever asked for 
iron, no quarry ever sought for stone with which 
to build them. No sentinels ever paced the cor- 
ridors, no guards ever watched their walls, no 
state ever paid for their support, no officer ever 
took a single criminal there, — yet their cells are 
always full. 

The population of these dungeons of the air, 
like the population of the dungeons on the ground, 
is very representative. There are educated there 
and ignorant, rich and poor, white and black, re- 
ligious and irreligious. Like the population of 
other dungeons, it has also one common fault : 
the inmates of the stone dungeons are all there be- 
cause they did wrong, the inmates of the air dun- 
geons suffer because they thought wrong. They 
imagined a vain thing and that is why they are 
there. 

Let me act as warden and take you through a 
corridor of one of these dungeons of the air. 
Though there are no iron bars and though the in- 
mates may look sulky, I assure you that no harm 
will come to you from any, for they gnaw and claw 
no one but themselves. 

The first cell to the right is occupied by a man 
who has been there many years. He is in for 
imagining that the world is full of cheats. He 
declares that all men are liars in a crisis and most 
of them thieves at heart. He was deceived sev- 
eral times in his earlier years ; a trusted employee 
tapped his safe and a business associate dragged 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 97 

him liip-deep into debt. See the pinched lips, the 
drawn eyelids, the frowning brow. ' He seldom 
changes his position or his looks. Many who pass 
his cell remark after passing that he reminds them 
of a lion at bay. His eye is both a warning and a 
weapon. 

The next cell and, in fact, the next five cells are 
occupied by young men who have lost faith in the 
opposite sex. The women's ward is full of such 
inmates. One of these young men, the one in the 
third cell, says he wouldn't believe a woman's word 
again if she took an oath on a stack of Bibles a 
mile high. He was disappointed by his fiancee 
only a week before the day appointed for their 
wedding, and with that disappointment went all the 
confidence and all the tenderness he ever had for 
woman kind. Other youths have occupied the cell 
he now possesses and in a little while went out into 
the affairs of the world again, and he may too ; but 
you can see from the way in which he looks upon 
the photo on the table that he is in the grip of a 
terrible despair. You need not speak in a whisper 
for he hears not what we say nor knows that we 
are here. 

The cell beyond this row of five disappointed 
Romeos is occupied by two men who believe that 
the world is growing worse. They spend much of 
the day and part of the night comparing the vices 
of the present with the virtues of the past. The 
hospitals, they claim, are proof positive that peo- 
ple are growing weaker. Often have I heard them 



98 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

say that no one ever heard of appendicitis when 
they were boys or any of the other half a hundred 
ills for which men now are drugged and cut. The 
streets are proof positive, they say, that children 
are no more reared as they used to be. When 
they were boys, they say, they used the streets for 
travel and spent the nights at home ; now the chil- 
dren use them for base-ball, profanity and insult 
and prowl about in them half the night. Nothing 
stirs them with such indignation as the manner in 
which the country is run by politicians today. 
When they were boys officials served their country, 
now they serve themselves. " The idea," they say, 
as they hammer their canes upon the floor, " of a 
President asking twenty-five thousand dollars a 
year for travelling expenses and of Congressmen 
spending thousands of dollars for an election ! " 
The only time they smile is when they recall the 
good old times when a man would rather be right 
than President. They imagine that the old was 
all good and the new all bad in politics. 

The next few cells are occupied by people who 
imagine that they have fatal diseases. The 
women's ward is also full of such inmates. Every 
time one of them gormandized and his heart flut- 
tered a little he knew that he had another attack 
of heart trouble and began to cultivate a funeral 
face. One of them came from tubercular parents 
and every time he contracted a cold he was sure 
that consumption was beginning to gallop him to 
the grave. Another had a fall and imagined that 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 99 

his nerves were shattered beyond repair. His 
window is stacked with empty bottles and his 
pockets full of pills and pellets. Had he a 
diploma he could open a modest apothecary shop. 
The conversation of these people is limited almost 
entirely to pains and aches. They enjoy feeling 
sick. 

Next to these cells are a few occupied by men 
who took themselves too seriously. One of them 
is a man of liberal education and is constantly re- 
peating the words of melancholy Hamlet: 

" The times are out of joint; oh wretched spite, 
That I was born to set them right." 

Another spends his time writing theories of gov- 
ernment and planning new methods of business. 

They have retired Atlas on half pay and have 
assumed his entire burden. Of that sweet rest 
that comes to a man who fills a day with a day's 
toil and then goes home to dandle his children on 
his knees at eventide, leaving the big world with its 
rush and roar outside, they know nothing. Their 
heart is under every capitol ; the quiver of every 
factory is in their nerves. When they spoke in 
earlier years they felt sure that they had fired the 
shot that was heard round the world. Discover- 
ing that their fellows by their side hardly heard a 
whistling they fell into a dismal cynicism that 
landed them here. 

Beyond these cells are some occupied by men 
who have lost faith in an over-ruling providence. 



100 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

These are the darkest cells of all. They were not 
always thus. There was a time when in the sweet 
innocence of childhood they folded their dimpled 
hands in prayer as sweetly as angels before the 
throne, when their youthful lips sang songs as 
sweet and pure and full of faith as that which 
floats in mellowing cadence over the hills of Para- 
dise. But passing years took treasures from 
them ; the good died young as well as the bad ; 
railroad accidents killed the righteous as well as 
the unrighteous ; lightning smote irrespective of 
faith ; godly parents were cursed with ungodly chil- 
dren ; right was often strangled and wrong was 
often crowned. They have not forgotten the 
sweet faith of their childhood in the providence of 
God but they recall it as they recall the stories of 
wonderland, with a secret wish that they were 
children again and possessed of a simple child-like 
faith. The men who occupy these cells are 
steeped in a gloom within that is deeper than the 
gloom without and are of all the people in these 
dungeons in the air the most pitiable. 

We are now at the end of the corridor. Let me 
take you back to our starting point and show you 
the door. 

You ask me why all these people are here and 
why these dungeons of the air exist. Look at the 
inscription above the door. " The Dungeon of 
Vain Imagination." You ask, " Why do the peo- 
ple imagine a vain thing? " I answer, for a num- 
ber of reasons which it is useless for us to mention 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 101 

or guess at. When prisoners are in dungeons of 
stone and iron we waste no time in dissecting their 
crimes and analyzing their motives ; the time for 
that is past. Instead of asking how they got 
there, we ask how we can get them out. For that 
their friends work, for that their attorneys plead. 

That is our motive today. We surmise that 
some of you may be occupying a cell in one of 
these dungeons of the air this very moment, and 
have not the least doubt that you all were prison- 
ers in one of them sometime in your life. As the 
imprisonment is entirely voluntary the liberation 
must also be voluntary, and so I am going to ap- 
peal to you to liberate yourself from your incar- 
ceration. 

Whether you are an old man or a new man, in 
for many years or only for a few weeks, in the 
first cell or the last, the door is open and the only 
thing that lies between you and a free happy life 
of sunshine and joy is your own will. Why should 
you condemn all men because a few deceived and 
betrayed you.^ You do not treat your house thus. 
If there is a defect or two in one of its parts you 
hire a carpenter or painter to come and remove 
or cover it. You want to forget the ugly and see 
only the beautiful and the good. If your watch 
betrays you, you don't sell it to the junk dealer or 
trade it for a sun dial ; you take it to the jeweller 
and ask him to repair it. You want to forget the 
ugly and see only the beautiful and the good. If 
a train ditches you, you don't denounce the rail- 



102 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

roads and yoke an ox ; you take the first train that 
is made up and go more confidently on your way 
than you did before. The company immediately 
clears the track, removes the cars and puts per- 
fect ones in their place. It wants the people to 
forget the ugly and see only the beautiful and the 
good. Why should we treat God's divinest handi- 
work as we would not think of treating wood or 
stone? Though there be rogues and libertines 
among the sons of men, not all are fallen. One 
Judas made it dark for Christ, but the eleven re- 
mained and the weakest became the mightiest. 
One Arnold made it dark for Washington, but 
Lafayette and Green and Wa3^ne and Marion re- 
mained and worked all the harder because one 
turned traitor. 

Come out of your dungeon of skepticism. All 
men are not liars, even if David did say so once 
upon a time. Lie said it in his haste, and if he 
had taken time to think he wouldn't have said it at 
all. Neither are all men cheats. Many are ac- 
cused of things they never dreamed of doing. For 
seventy-five summers a story was told, in the 
harvest field of a Pennsylvania farmer, of the dis- 
appearance of a sickle that was hung on a tree 
while a father flogged his boy. This spring the 
man who received the flogging seventy-five years 
ago struck something hard as he was drawing a 
cross-cut saw across the trunk of an ancient tree. 
It was the old sickle. The father in his patri- 
archal anger forgot where he put it and nature, 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 103 

to remind the boy in his latter years of the good 
old da^'s of birch and bacon, buried it in the bark. 
For many years suspicion rested upon the men 
who were near the scene ; yet they were as innocent 
as sleeping babes. Many of our suspicions are 
the rankest embezzlements. Depend upon it, you 
sullen old cynic, that no one is wholly depraved, 
few as bad as they are supposed to be, and many 
accused who are entirely innocent. 

" Then at the balance let's be mute; 

We never can adjust it; 
What's done we partly can compute, 

But know not what's resisted. 

" One point must still be greatly dark, 

The moving why they do it; 
And just as lamely can ye mark, 

How far, perhaps, they rue it." 

Quit imagining such a monstrous fallacy as the 
depravity of the whole human race. Think of the 
goodness of bad men rather than the badness of 
good men. Set your ear to the robin, turn your 
eyes to the stars. Let the cranes hunt snails and 
the frogs croak. God made you for better things. 

And you who are moping in the cells of dis- 
gruntled reminiscence, what are you doing there.'' 
The world isn't worse than it was when you were 
boys. The hospitals are not proof positive that 
we are weaker than we used to be ; they prove that 
we take better care of each other than we used to. 



104 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

Instead of committing our loved ones tearfully to 
the hands of a mysterious providence we commit 
them to the hands of a surgeon who knows just 
where to cut and what to remove. People live 
longer and grow taller than they did fifty years 
ago. The wives and daughters of our day couldn't 
begin to get into the dresses worn by the women 
who attended the inauguration of Washington a 
century and a quarter ago. Our health is better, 
our faces fairer, our lives safer than they ever 
were in the history of the world. It is said that 
over half the faces that looked up at Washington 
as he took the oath of office were pitted over with 
the marks of smallpox, and his was too. Today 
you can travel across the continent without seeing 
one. 

The newspapers are not proof that crime is on 
a rampage and vice increasing every year. There 
were as man}^ stars before the telescope was made 
as there have been since the time of its invention. 
It only brought more within the range of our 
vision. The newspaper is simply a telescope. 
Seventy-five years ago half the crimes were unde- 
tected, now they are shouted on the streets of 
cities on the other side of the world only a few 
moments after they occur. When Mayor Gaynor 
was shot on board a ship in New York harbor I 
was reading a morning paper in Newark, across 
the river. Hardly had I finished it before a news- 
boy came along shouting, " Extra ; Ma3^or Gay- 
nor shot ! " I read it ; it had only a general ac- 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 105 

count of the attempted assassination. In a few 
minutes I was across the Hudson on the New York 
side of the river, when another " newsy " came 
along shouting, " Special extra, all about the 
mayor ! " I bought again and learned how the 
mayor's pulse was beating, what the doctors had 
to say and what his chances for recovery were. 
Within three hours I had three papers which kept 
me better posted on the events of the day than I 
would have been had I been as tall as the statue of 
Liberty and occupied the same point of vantage. 

But the quickness with which crime is detected 
and reported is no indication of its increase. It 
is only proof of the impossibility of keeping it 
secret and that in itself is a powerful deterrent. 
The world is growing better. It is better today 
than it ever was before and it's going to be better 
tomorrow. So come out of your cell, turn your 
face toward the sun and be a man. 

The exposures of political corruption in our 
country and others is no proof that politicians are 
worse today than they were before. If you leave 
the rosy recollections of your hazy memory a 
while and go up to the attic and unearth a few 
old papers that your father laid away in the days 
of Jackson or Clay or Grant you will find that 
3^our demigods were very human, their heads as 
cunning, their fingers as long and their ways as 
crafty and vindictive as the worst today. Lifting 
the record of many an old political campaign is 
like lifting a moss-grown log from its wormy bed. 



106 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

Prying into the details of many an ancient ad- 
ministration is like prying into a long unopened 
cellar. 

Think not, Sir Knight of the Frowning Brow, 
that public plunderers were only born in these 
latter years. The progeny of Achan is very 
ancient. Uncle Sam was robbed as persistently 
fifty years ago as he has been in recent years. 
The only difference between the two eras is that 
then he went along with his sack on his back with- 
out knowing that the boys had ripped it, while 
now he turns around and flogs them for it. But 
the corn was dropping all the time. 

The trouble with you men is that you have lost 
your nerve of appreciation. You are like the 
wise old grandfathers who shake their heads and 
rue the fact that the pippins and the baldwins are 
not as good as they were when they were boys. 
The fact is that they have lost over half their 
nerves of taste and simply can't enjoy them as 
they used to. In a boy the nerves of taste cover 
not only the top and the bottom of the tongue but 
also the sides of the mouth. Every square inch 
of his mouth is full of hungry nerves, and when a 
pippin or a baldwin makes its luckless way into his 
mammoth cave they pounce upon it like a clan of 
cannibals. The brain gets a report of the feast 
from every nerve that helped to enjoy it. Natur- 
ally the total impression is jubilant. But poor 
grandfather has only a few nerves of taste left on 
his coated tongue and they, like his teeth, are 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 107 

worn and ragged. The apples have not changed, 
he has. 

Oh, come out of jour dismal cell and bask your- 
self in the sunshine of the best civilization and the 
happiest era the world has ever seen. God in- 
tended jou to look forward, else He would have 
put your eyes in the back of your head. Don't 
pour your tears down your spine. If you have 
any to shed, shed them where they will roll over 
your heart and moisten your sympathies. 

" Keep out of the Past. It is lonely, 

And barren and bleak to the view; 
Its fires have grown cold, and its stories are old — 

Turn, turn to the Present — the New; 
Today leads you up to the hilltops 

That are kissed by the radiant sun. 
Today shows no tomb, life's hopes are in bloom. 

And today holds the prize to be won." 

And you who are in the cells of disease, why do 
you imagine such a vain thing .'^ No disease is 
fatal until it has killed you, and you're not dead 
yet. There isn't a disease known among men that 
is absolutely and invariably fatal. Men call the 
white plague fatal but it is only fatal to those who 
run. When I left home for college I told a few 
friends that I would probably be back before 
Christmas to attend a funeral. I had a consump- 
tive cousin in mind. Sixteen years he lived there- 
after, seeing " men of pith and might and valor " 
pass before him to the tomb. Another, about the 



108 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

same time, was allowed a few months by the physi- 
cians who knew him. He clung to fences as a 
drowning man clings to a board and coughed most 
piteously every time he ventured upon a little walk. 
Three of the physicians who gave him up have al- 
ready passed on to await his arrival. But the 
probabilities are that they will see a considerable 
number of arrivals before he makes his ; for he 
sits as quietly through an hour's service as any one 
in the house of God. Not a cough, not a flutter 
passes his lips. He is healed of his infirmity and 
cured of his disease. The founder of the first san- 
atorium in the Adirondacks was carried there on a 
cot to die, but he too decided to stay and stayed 
long enough to build up one of the most beneficent 
institutions on our northern hills. 

If men have achieved such glorious victories 
from man's most persistent foe, why should you 
fall back in the tent of despair at the sight of 
weaker ones ? You must not suppose that because 
your parents died of a certain disease you are 
fore-doomed to die of it also. Modern science has 
abandoned that idea entirely. Environment has 
sent more people to the grave than heredity has, 
and neglect more than both. Like produces like, 
but from birth the resources of the universe await 
the bidding of each new creature. Use them and 
be strong. The trouble with you wheezing, sneez- 
ing, plastered saints is that you are living too near 
the brink of Jordan. Every time a quack comes 
along with a mixture of bran, lard and perfume. 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 109 

guaranteed to cure any one of a dozen supposedly 
incurable ills, he convinces you that you have 
about half of them and sells you a few boxes of his 
mixtures, leaving you in a few weeks with the con- 
viction that your continued side stitches and pains 
are heaven's kind premonitions of your approach- 
ing funeral. Let your pulse take care of itself; 
it did it nobly before you knew that you had it. 
Leave the selection of your shroud and the ar- 
rangements of your funeral to your relatives. 
Hunt the woods, climb the rocks, jump the 
streams, throw your voice against the hills, live in 
God's country, and the wild harangue of the quack 
will soon sound as foolish to you as the gibbering 
of a parrot. Anteus the wrestler could never be 
thrown until his opponent lifted him from the 
ground. As long as he touched the earth he was 
invincible. So are we against disease. In con- 
tact with nature and in harmony with her laws, 
we can resist any disease that man has ever known. 
Out of touch with nature, we are the helpless vic- 
tims of almost anything that comes along. 

Health and disease are largely matters of tem- 
perament. The one who mentally scratches 
around in his stomach for albumen and acids as an 
old hen digs the barnyard for corn and sand is 
sure to have a very disordered stomach. How 
could it be otherwise? The person who daily 
patrols his nervous system and puts an extra force 
on at night, with orders to report every new sen- 
sation and keep it under surveillance, can hardly 



110 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

expect to enjoy good health, for good health and 
peace are inseparable conditions. Military law is 
as detrimental to the free intercourse of the body 
as it is to the traffic of the town. 

Abandon your superstitions, throw your aches 
and ailments away. God doesn't want you to 
grunt, else He would have given you a deeper 
voice, and bristles. Be cheerful and glad, no mat- 
ter how many odds are against you. The millions 
that try to overthrow you as they come upon you 
on the avenues of the wind and the highways of 
food and drink are nothing compared to the hosts 
that come riding down the boulevard of sunshine. 
" They that be for us are more than they that be 
against us." 

And now, brother Job, we will take you by the 
arm, — oh, excuse me, I forgot about that boil. 
You're sore and bleeding, bruised at heart and 
shattered in fortune ; life is a tangled skein, a 
jungle in which roots and snakes are indistinguish- 
able and you hardly know which way to tread. 
You are not to be trifled with or lightly answered, 
you say, for you have sat too long in the silences 
of mystery. Brother, I would rather pelt an angel 
than treat your troubled soul irreverently. The 
man who has lost his hold on God is of all men the 
most in need of thoughtful aid. Your losses, you 
say, have confused and stunned you and sent you 
reeling to the earth; the soul that once went up 
on wings of song to the throne of God has fallen 
like an eagle shot in flight and only flutters now 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 111 

among the hedges, sickened, frightened, limp and 
dizzy. 

Well, let us admit all that you say, brother, and 
take it for granted that your sorrow has not led 
you to magnify your troubles ; let us also assume 
that your troubles are not the fruit of your own 
neglect or folly ; also that, as far as human stan- 
dards go, your life deserved a better turn. Let 
us assume everything that you say and think about 
your life is true. 

What then.? Is God still in the scheme of 
things or has the stage coach lost its driver ? You 
say we are running on gravity and the pleasant 
slopes are only the precursors of the bumps and 
jolts which will ultimately snap the axles and 
crush the wheels. 

But wait a minute, brother. How old are you.'' 
" Forty-five," you say. Forty-five is a rather 
scant acquaintance with a universe that has been 
doing business at the same stand for at least ten 
thousand and perhaps ten million years. If you 
wanted to know the value of a power plant you 
wouldn't take the verdict of a man who ran 
through it in the dark. You would want to speak 
with the man who built and operated it, the men 
who lived there. Forty-five years is too short a 
time in which to judge the providence of God; it 
can't be studied on a run. " When God walks the 
earth his steps are often centuries apart," and 
you will never know where He is going or what He 
is about until you throw your little life into the 



lia RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

life of the race and go with him as the mountain- 
minded, hoary-headed man who breakfasted in 
Eden and hopes to sup in Paradise. 

And, brother, what is the size of that hat you 
wear? " Seven and a quarter." That tells me 
whence your struggles. A wearer of a smaller hat 
knows not what a mental struggle is. Doubts 
never knocked at his door, neither great hopes. 
Thank God for the dome He placed upon you. If 
it has the power to cast great shadows, it has also 
the power to reflect much of the glory of God. 

" There is more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, sir, than half your creeds." 

But, brother, what would you think of a God who 
wore a seven and a quarter hsit? Do you think a 
head of that size could take care of the rivers and 
the seas, the winds and the rains, the seasons and 
the stars.? An ant pushing its way through the 
hedges of the forest might as well pass judgment 
on the movements of the explorer, as little man 
pass judgment on the actions of Him who holds 
the sea in the hollow of his hand. You will be con- 
fused as long as you set your little self against 
the great God. 

But you say, like Job, " Physicians of no 
value." The Bible is very careful to tell us that 
God is personally interested in every one of us. 
It says, " I remember thee," " I will never leave 
thee," "There shall no evil befall thee." The 
promises of personal care drop upon us numer- 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 113 

ously from the Bible as roses from the latticed 
ceiling of Caesar's dining room upon the guests. 
Are they dropped only to charm us into forget- 
fulness ? No, they fall upon us to keep us in mind 
of the fragrant love behind them. Every promise 
of personal care is bona fide, as thousands upon 
thousands in heaven and earth can testify. You 
cannot understand it, because you are too near the 
tragedy. You are like the patient just come 
from the operating table. The hurt of the wound 
crowds out the thought of the cure. You are 
like the orchestra boy behind the drums, too near 
the thunder to hear the music. Distance is nec- 
essary to appreciate almost everything. Be sat- 
isfied to wait and you will find the ways of God 
in your poor smitten life so dazzling with glory 
that you will have to shade your eyes in beholding 
them. 

Back in the bygone seons of unremembered 
time a troupe of sunbeams came merrily down the 
sky. Mercury and Venus sang with syren voice 
as they passed by and did their utmost to draw 
them thither, but the great Father of light had 
told them not to stop until they reached the 
third planet in their journey. Finding the planets 
they passed so cheerful and gay, they fancied 
among themselves that their life on earth would be 
one glad, free and unending song. But poor 
little mites, when they drew near their inherent 
force sent them with such speed down upon the 
earth that they lost themselves in the tangled 



114 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

shadows of the Carboniferous age. In vain they 
tried to untangle themselves and travel the air 
again. They had reached the destination to 
which they were sent and for further journey had 
no power. So, weeping and lamenting, they 
pined their lives away as one by one the leaves and 
brambles fell upon them. Their lives they 
thought were failures, their end ignoble ; but to- 
day those buried sunbeams shine with a permanent 
glory in the crown of a king. Are not diamonds 
resurrected sunbeams? 

Be not discouraged with your life or the provi- 
dence of God. It requires centuries sometimes 
for God to reap his harvest. You may be better 
for some chance word that Columbus spoke to his 
guards as he lay in chains in Spain. Some one 
may be helped along life's pathway a century from 
now by the sorrow that you bear today. When 
Lisbon was shaken by an earthquake Lake Mjosen 
up in Norway rose twenty feet. When Christ 
was shaken with the agonies of death the earth 
was lifted into sight of heaven. 

Do not despise your sorrows. They come to 
bless you and the world. One day the custodian 
of Kennelworth castle admitted a stranger at the 
door. He had a Scotch accent and limped slightly 
and the custodian paid little attention to him. 
When he left the custodian idly glanced at the 
registry on the table. You can imagine his sur- 
prise when he saw the name of Sir Walter Scott. 
He had come to immortalize the castle. Your 



DUNGEONS IN THE AIR 115 

sorrows come to immortalize you. Do not de- 
spise them because they are without form or come- 
liness. 

We ought to pass through our sorrows as the 
people of Moscow pass through the Redeemer 
Gate of their ancient wall. Above it is the pic- 
ture of Christ. King and peasant pass through 
with head uncovered. Thus Paul passed through 
his sorrows when he said, " I reckon that the suf- 
ferings of this present time are not worthy to be 
compared with the glory that shall be revealed in 
us," and thus he went to glory. 

O ye who have lost your hold on God, whether 
in kingly palace or mountain hut, " lift your eyes 
unto the hills whence cometh our strength " ; if 
you cannot see and understand, trust and be at 
peace. " All things work together for good to 
them that love the Lord." The tunnels lead to 
the mountains and the mountains lead to God. 



THE HOPELESS QUEST 

"Canst thou by searching find out God?" 

Job 11:7. 

From the time that the first man went to see 
what was on the other side of the nearest tree 
until the present moment man has been an inveter- 
ate explorer. At first he merely explored the 
forest in which he lived and satisfied his curiosity 
by tracking birds to their nest and beasts to their 
lair. Bye-and-bye he became curious to know 
where the rivers came from. That quest led him 
to the mountains, where were gulches and caves 
and peaks. The latter gave him a vision of an- 
other world on the other side of the ridge that 
fenced him in. Shortly he was exploring that, 
crossing its lakes and inland seas. Later in his- 
tory he crossed the oceans, reached the poles, 
climbed the fleecy mountains of the sky. 

Side by side with the explorations on the top of 
things went the explorations into things. The 
astrologers held converse with the stars, the al- 
chemists bent their ears to the secrets of the 
metals, the physicists cross-examined the pendu- 
lum, the tuning fork and the lens. 

But older and more persistent than these 

jaunts in quest of things material has been man's 

116 



THE HOPELESS QUEST 117 

age-old quest after the One who made and governs 
all. Geographical explorations have been the 
fads of certain centuries, as have the astrological 
and the alchemical and the mechanical, but the 
exploration after God has been the unfailing oc- 
cupation of man from the time when he first looked 
up and realized that there was a power not his 
own in the world in which he lived. 

The attempts to find out God have made one of 
the most fascinating chapters, as well as one of 
the most pathetic, in human history. They are 
as full of daring as the journeys of Columbus and 
Pizarro, as sublime in their devotion as the 
plunges of Livingstone and Stanley, as tearful in 
their pathos as the stories of Franklin and Scott. 

But man never let the dangers of investigation 
smother his love for truth, nor the difficulty of the 
task dismay him. Insuperability has always 
challenged him. Though history insisted that 
the poles would never be reached, man persisted in 
trying to reach them. Though experience in- 
sisted that God is beyond the grasp of man, man 
has always tried to comprehend Him. 

Our text gives us a full-length picture of a man 
in that employment. He is in trouble, the gar- 
ment in which man travels farthest toward the In- 
finite ; — his wealth is gone, his health is gone, his 
children are gone, and worst of all, his grip upon 
himself is gone. He had been an upright man, 
an honest man, a helpful man, a father to the 
fatherless, a support to the widows, a friend to 



118 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

all. Why should he be paid in such coin for that 
which was so noble and divine? 

He cannot understand it. It seems like 
mockery, a horrible nightmare, a drunken orgie. 
The beautiful scheme of things that seemed so 
orderly when the cattle on a thousand hills were 
his has the wild, demonic confusion of a forest- 
levelling cyclone, and he hardly knows whether 
back of all there is a person or a force. While he 
is in this mad clutch of distraction, Zopher, a 
friend, comes along and warns him against losing 
faith in the Infinite. The salve that he gives him 
is the usual ointment that a man in prosperity 
gives his smitten brother. With its composition 
or its efficacy we are not concerned. We have all 
given and all received it often enough to know how 
little there is in it. The thing that concerns us 
is the eternal question that he puts to Job, " Canst 
thou by searching find out God? " That ques- 
tion we purpose to put to nature, to reason, to 
history and to Christ. If it was profitable to a 
mind distracted, it ought to be more profitable to 
a mind serene. 

Nature, thou learned sage, with thy sun- 
crowned head and thy mountain-wrinkled brow, 
thou whose heart throbs are the swelling seas, 
whose blackboard is the night, whose letters are 
the stars, who of old didst discourse to the sages, 
tell us, can a man by searching find out God? 

Listen, as the answer comes from the rattling 
thunders and the swishing seas, the lion's roar 



THE HOPELESS QUEST 119 

and the serpent's hiss, the robin's song and the 
cedar's sigh! They are sent out to teach all na- 
tions, as the disciples were of old. Have they 
ever taught the nations who God is, what His na- 
ture is, the depth of His love, the wonders of His 
grace? Poets have fancied that they have. In 
the spotless snows they have read the declaration 
of God's purity ; in the soft touch of the falling 
flake, His tenderness and love. But the very 
snows that teach the poet purity and kindness 
form the avalanches on the mountains and the 
slush on the plains and leave behind them a trail 
of pleurisy and pneumonia, tears and graves, that 
no man can measure. 

In the bountiful rivers, with their ceaseless flow 
and verdant banks, the poet has seen the message 
of God's providential care. To him the tribu- 
taries are the fingers of God caressing the fevered 
brow of His continental children. But the rivers 
that bless one month are as likely to flood and 
damage the next. And what do they care if a 
boat capsizes on their bosom or a babe slips in 
from their treacherous shores? In the bending 
bush of the fragrant rose others have read the 
goodness of God. " Every common bush is 
aflame with God," said Browning. But the bush 
that charms the nostril is as ready to puncture 
the eye and destroy the sight. 

Nature is orderly and in most of her operations 
intelligible and benign, but she no more teaches 
us God than the mathematical department of a 



120 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

college teaches theology or a boiler shop, poetry. 
The most unsatisfactory book that the great Pro- 
fessor John Fiske ever wrote was " Through Na- 
ture to God," for it took one only through nature 
to the end of nature. You might as well try to 
tell me the complexion and nature and age and 
residence of the men who made your watch by in- 
specting it and studying its parts, as to try to 
find out God by studying nature. All that your 
watch teaches you is that the men who made it 
knew more than 3'^ou do and all that nature teaches 
us about God is that He is wiser than we are. 

Nature teaches us to apprehend God but not to 
comprehend Him. The keenest poet might wan- 
der from bush to bush and from crag to crag, 
skimming rivers and crossing seas, asking of all 
the question, " Who is God? " and he would not in 
a thousand years get a single answer. His quest 
would be as futile as the quest of the Holy Grail 
and his travels as ceaseless as those of the wander- 
ing Jew. The existence of God is undeniably 
demonstrated by nature but his personality is not. 
Nature takes us only to the outer hedge of the 
King's gardens. She gives us no view of even the 
palace, much less of his imperial self. 

Having found the eloquent tongue of nature 
unable to tell us who God is, let us ask the ques- 
tion of that imperial monarch, the human mind. 
Shakespeare said, " There are richer things in 
heaven and earth than we in our philosophies 
ever dreamed of," but the converse is just as true, 



THE HOPELESS QUEST 121 

for there are richer things in our philosophies 
than the starry spheres or the gorgeous earth ever 
told to man. Who dare say that Helen Keller, 
though deaf, dumb and blind, does not live in a 
richer world than tens of thousands with all their 
faculties. Man can retire into the solitude of 
silence, close his eyes and pass through richer ex- 
periences than many a king ever knew on his cor- 
onation day. He can bring up the past, reflect 
upon the present, conjure up the future, fly on 
the wings of fancy to the uttermost parts of the 
earth, tread the golden highway of faith to the 
very throne of God. If walls imprison him, he 
can pass through them and prattle again at his 
mother's knee or romp with his playmates in the 
field ; if sickness oppresses him, he can shake off^ 
his weakness and in a moment climb the Alps or 
fight the surf. 

And as imperial as is his fancy, so sovereign is 
his reason. He looks toward the tree and dis- 
cerning the direction of the leaves says, " It's 
going to be clear." The clouds and the sky in- 
dicate him a liar, but clear it soon becomes. He 
looks at Uranus and because of her peculiar be- 
havior he says that another planet farther out 
will soon appear. The silence of the centuries is 
against him, but men turn their telescopes in the 
direction he indicates and lo, old Neptune comes 
along ! 

He looks at the steam rising from the kitchen 
kettle and he says, " That steam can do some 



122 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

work." A million steaming kettles laugh him to 
scorn, but presently the hills are echoing with the 
iron steeds and the mountains reverberating with 
their shrieking yells as they go panting up the 
steeps with a thousand tons behind them. 

He sees birds flying through the air and he 
says, " If man can travel with the whale he can 
also travel with the eagle," and he tells men the 
reason for the faith that is in him. Darius 
Green with his flying machine mocks him, but to- 
day man flies. 

Oh, wonderful is the mind of man ! Before the 
world dreams of ships and cables, bridges and tun- 
nels, cities and nations, they are already being 
forged on the anvil of hard, cold logic in thought- 
ful men's minds. The mind of man and not the 
shop is the home of the world's wonders. Surely 
if nature could not impress upon the plastic mind 
of the poet the secret of God, the philosopher, 
scientific and metaphysical, with his depth of 
reason, his syllogistic grasp, his far reaching 
chain of cause and eff^ect, ought to be able to find 
Him. Has this wonderful mind of man succeeded 
in finding out God by reasoning toward and con- 
cerning Him? 

The best answer to this question is the experi- 
ence of Herbert Spencer. Being a friend and 
contemporary of Darwin, he soon left the Bible 
as an inspired book out of his calculations and 
pushed his way through the categories of thought 
without any reference to it. He spoke learnedly 



THE HOPELESS QUEST 123 

about many things and led his readers to many 
helpful conclusions, but his conclusion about God 
was not only that we cannot know Him but that 
He is unknowable. Spencer declares not only 
that the human mind alone cannot find out God 
but that it cannot even reach Him. His logic 
falls asleep, like a tired child in a forest at even- 
ing, without having found the light at the farther 
end. The hopelessness of such a quest is brought 
out in the sad comment he made upon his life 
shortly before his death, when he said, " I doubt 
very much whether the world has been made bet- 
ter by a single page I have ever written." 

Omar Khayyam of Persia, without having a 
Bible to cast aside, undertook the same task that 
engaged the genius of Spencer. He was the 
brightest pagan of the Christian era and drank 
deeply of the wells of silence and of thought. 
Like David of old, he considered the heavens, the 
work of God's fingers, the moon and the stars 
which He had ordained. The evening sky, the 
rising moon, the potter's shop, the budding rose, 
the mouldering log, all steeped him in thought 
that reached out beyond the " bourne of time and 
space " ; but when he summed the whole scheme 
up he could come to no other conclusion than that 

" We are no other than a moving row 

Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go 

Round the sun-illumined lantern held 
In midnight by the Master of the show." 



124 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

All that thought told him about God was that 
He was an inexorable, cold, relentless master of a 
lot of sorry, helpless puppets and that we are 

" But helpless pieces of the game he plays 
Upon tliis checker-board of nights and days; 

Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, 
And one by one back in the closet lays." 

Centuries and seas divide Khayyam and Spen- 
cer. They both attempted the same thing, try- 
ing to reason their way to God, and both failed. 
Should a third arise on some Pacific isle a thous- 
and years hence and make the experiment again, 
we doubt not that the result would be the same. 

Having found that reason cannot find out God, 
let us turn our question now to history. Some- 
times in spite of our deepest thinking and our 
soundest conclusions, affairs turn out contrary to 
our convictions. 

Patrick Henry, who magnetized the Virginia 
Legislature by crying, " Give me liberty or give 
me death," in another speech warned his fellow 
countrymen against the dangers of a president, 
assuring them that there would be nothing be- 
tween a president and an absolute czar but his own 
sweet will. Another example of history mocking 
prophecy is seen in the utilization of steam for 
ocean travel. The very ship that made the first 
trip across the Atlantic by steam carried in one 
of her cabins a pamphlet proving that it would 



THE HOPELESS QUEST 125 

be impossible for a ship to hold enough coal to 
make such a voyage. 

Perhaps the history of the world disproves the 
conclusions of poetry and philosophy in a similar 
manner. May it not be possible that some oracle 
somewhere in Grecian groves or India's hills or 
Egypt's plains may have declared God and re- 
vealed him to man, notwithstanding the fact that 
the poet and the philosopher could not discern 
him? Call the nations to witness. 

Greece, what hast thou to say? We have 
learned much from thee. Thou hast taken us from 
the saddle to the book and given us the cultured 
music of speech for the war cry of the forest. 
Tell us, can a man by searching find out God? 

Her answer is at hand when you go through 
Athens with Paul and see the statuary on the 
street. Every square contains a statue of a god, 
every public place a temple or a shrine to some 
deity, and to avoid the possibility of neglecting 
one they erect one to the unknown god. Instead 
of finding God Greece wanders into the grossest 
polytheism and worships so many gods that a 
Roman satirist flings the taunt at Athens that 
there are more gods there than men. But, you 
say, Greece was in her decadence then. Her glory 
had departed. If you want to know what Greece 
was able to do you must visit her in her prime. 
Be it so. Let us visit Greece five hundred years 
before the days of Paul and ask Socrates the ques- 



1S6 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

tion of our text. Socrates, thou noblest, purest, 
wisest of the pagans. Gentile forerunner of the 
Nazarene, tell us, can a man by searching find out 
God? Listen as he speaks to his pupils the very 
answer to our question, " We shall never know 
God until God himself comes among men, or God's 
man." That was the confession of Grecian 
thought at its best. 

The inability of Greece to find out God was 
shared by Egypt, India, China, Japan, America, 
all the nations of the earth, and if we were to sum- 
mon the sages of these countries and repeat our 
question to them we should receive a similar reply 
or what would amount to the same. 

Over amid the ruins of Egypt, the excavators 
recently came upon the kneeling image of an an- 
cient priest. Upon the statue was carved an in- 
scription showing that it was made five hundred 
years before the time of Moses. When the Egyp- 
tian diggers came upon it and saw its staring eyes 
they fled in terror, fearing that they had disturbed 
the devotions of some spirit. The statue is now in 
the Louvre in Paris. That priest kneeling there 
in the darkness of Egyptian oblivion represents 
the kneeling world, trying, without divine revela- 
tion, to find out God ; and as the closing centuries 
left the one about where the opening centuries 
found it, so did they leave the other. It was a 
long, long night that the world spent in the dark, 
but just the kind of night the world needed to 
learn its own helplessness and insufficiency. 



THE HOPELESS QUEST 127 

Turning now from the oracles and shrines of 
pagan piety and leaving the prayers of priests and 
songs of poets, let us ask the question of the Gali- 
lean. Jesus, thou Saviour of men, magnetic cen- 
ter of humanity, healer of broken hearts, moulder 
of nations, master of life and conqueror of death, 
far-seeing prophet of the invisible and the eternal, 
tell us, can a man by searching find out God? 
Turn not your ears to the sky for the answer, for 
He answered the question before He went back to 
the sky. Take up your old Bible, that surf- 
washed shell of eternal truth and catch the mur- 
mur of an ancient conversation : " No man know- 
eth who the Father is but the Son and he to whom 
the Son will reveal Him." If He would have hung 
it on a streamer from Venus to Mars and written 
it in letters of solar flame. He could not have made 
it plainer than that. 

God must be known, if known at all, through 
revelation. Deductions, intuitions, beliefs, opin- 
ions are all suggestive but they caricature God 
more frequently than they describe him, as the sto- 
ries of heathen mythology and the ideas of unre- 
generate men prove. The god of intellectual de- 
ductions is simply a personification of human 
nature, colored and conditioned by national tradi- 
tions and provincial thought. Zeus was simply 
a big Greek ; Jupiter, a big Roman ; Odin, a big 
Scandinavian; Gitche Manito, a big Indian. 
Each was but an idealized national hero. So 
would be our God had not Jesus Christ come to 



128 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

reveal the Father to us. We would have put the 
best of our national traits together, poets would 
have idealized them, priests exalted them to divin- 
ity and we would be worshipping them today as 
our god. The gods of men are never more than a 
compound man exalted, a gaseous giant in a pal- 
ace of air just a little above the highest hill. 
Such a god, of course, could not long satisfy even 
a superstitious and sequestered people, and never 
an enlightened people such as we are. We must 
have a God who is no respecter of persons, a 
Father of Jew and Gentile, Greek and Roman, 
German and American, old and young, rich and 
poor, sad and glad; one whose heart throbs for 
and whose arms enfold all ; the God whom Christ 
revealed. 

Such being the case, the conclusion to our study 
of the hopeless quest is very plain ; it is the con- 
clusion which the Alpine guide impresses upon his 
tourists : an absolute, unquestioning obedience. 

The crevasses of the Alps hold unnumbered 
thousands of climbers who thought they knew 
more than their guides and ventured on paths of 
their own selecting; the ossuaries hold the bones 
of many more who were recovered after their fatal 
plunge. To follow the guide everywhere requires 
gigantic faith, for he sometimes takes his tourist 
over ledges that show him an abyss of three thou- 
sand feet on one side and a perpendicular wall of 
two thousand feet on the other ; at times it seems 
as though the earth were flat and standing on 



THE HOPELESS QUEST 129 

edge, with the tourist and his guide half way up 
the plain, feeling as though the whole was soon to 
fall and annihilate them both forever. It is said 
that Alexander Dumas, once suddenly brought to 
one of these ledges, so trembled that he put a 
handkerchief between his teeth to keep from chat- 
tering them loose and that when he removed it, 
after passing the danger, he found that it was cut 
as clean as a butcher's cleaver would have done it. 
The Guide who leads us up the Alps of revelation 
takes us to ledges that look as dangerous, to 
heights that are as dizzy and promontories as 
bold ; but He never lost a soul that followed Him 
and therefore has a right to demand that we fol- 
low Him unquestioningly wherever He goes. 

When the tourist shrinks back and fears, the 
Alpine guide sometimes goes ahead and sits in the 
very jaws of an ice cavern to reassure him. 
Whatever Jesus asks you to do in climbing up to 
God, He has done before you. He asks you to 
turn your back on the world ; He did it himself. 
He asks you to serve others ; He did it long ago. 
He asks you to suffer for others ; He did it unto 
death. Everything that He ever asked any mor- 
tal to do since He called his first disciple. He did 
himself. 

Follow Him, though He leads you through pov- 
erty, through abuse and through hunger ; follow 
him everywhere, for " the sufferings of this pres- 
ent time are not worthy to be compared with the 
glory which shall be revealed in us." The climb 



130 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

may be hard and the road steep but it leads to the 
summit that shows you God. " I am the way, the 
truth and the life ; no man cometh unto the Father 
but by Me." 



THE DRY BROOK 

" And it came to pass after a while that the brook dried 
up, because there was no rain in the land." 

I Kings 17:7. 

Of all the charming scenes of nature there are 
few so fascinating as the bubbling, gurgling, chat- 
tering brook. The stars will throw us into won- 
der, the sunset sky will soothe us when we are tired, 
the solitude of the forest will remove us from the 
din and jargon of this rattling world, but for soli- 
tude and companionship and wonder combined the 
brook is the paragon of them all. It talks to you, 
while you meander along its banks, without con- 
tradicting or misinterpreting you. It tells you 
by its clearness how pure your soul should be, it 
shows you by its progress how swift your days 
pass by, it tells you by its chatter how blithe your 
life should be, for it chatters most when it strikes 
the biggest stones. 

Besides its beauty it commends itself to us for 
its usefulness. 

" How busy the wheels are in turning the stone 
And grinding to flour the grain we have grown.'* 

It is the brook that turns them round. 

" How luscious the fields in summer time grow, 
Spreading out the rich carpets where winter had 
snow." 

131 



132 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

It is the brook that helps to lay them. 

" How softly the willows, in modest green drest, 
Rock to slumber the babes of the oriole's nest." 

The brook supports the willows. It is the life, 
not only of the unconscious, inanimate things of 
the meadow, but the guardian also of the very 
birds. 

But what a poor, melancholy spectacle is a 
brook run dry, a brook without a brook ! Noth- 
ing to give to the birds but dry, indigestible peb- 
bles, nothing to give to the trees but dry and sun- 
parched crust, nothing to show to man but a scar 
in the face of the earth. Oh, what a difference 
between the sparkling, bickering, laughing brook 
and the dull, prosaic bed it leaves behind. It is 
as great a difference as that we notice when the 
soul of a dear one has fled and left us only the 
body in which it sparkled. 

But the dry brook sometimes comes. Not all 
the streams that manufacture transient diamonds 
by the way can sing with the brook that England's 
poet laureate knew, 

" For men may come and men may go 
But I go on forever/' 

for not all are fed by fountains that are as rich 
and unaffected by the droughts as the fountain of 
that delightful stream. 

Beside one of these frail streams, Elijah, Isra- 
el's ancient prophet, once was stranded. The 



THE DRY BROOK 133 

story of his residence there and the causes that 
drove him to it is one that is both pleasing and 
pathetic. 

When Ahab came to the throne of Israel he soon 
dragged Israel into sin and, of course, into the 
displeasure of God. He did evil, the Bible tells 
us, above any that were before him in Jerusalem. 
To pile Pelion upon Ossa, he married a heathen 
wife, the infamous and wicked Jezebel. It is 
doubtful whether one throne ever held two such 
bad hearts as the throne of Israel held when Ahab 
and Jezebel sat upon it. Jezebel, being a heathen, 
naturally brought some of the priests of her 
heathen religion into Israel when she became the 
wife of Ahab, and soon had altars erected for them 
and the people to become their followers. It was 
not long until the prophets of Jehovah were per- 
secuted and in some instances slain. In the place 
of Jehovah the apish followers of this wicked pair 
placed Baal and Ashtoreth. Baal was the god of 
business, of gold, and Ashtoreth the god of irre- 
ligious society. 

But God is not mocked long. At last all sin 
biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder, 
and sometimes the " at last " is not far removed 
from the beginning. It happens to be so with 
Ahab and his people. After they have wor- 
shipped their heathen gods long enough without 
disturbance to feel secure, God withdraws the woo- 
ing hand of mercy and looking to his attending 
angels, ever ready to do his bidding, points toward 



134 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

them the finger of condemnation. While they are 
flying out with their message to the winds and the 
clouds, telling them to pass the land of Israel by, 
God sends Elijah the prophet in to Ahab to tell 
him that his sin and the sin of his people is about 
to be punished. " As the Lord, the God of Israel, 
liveth," he says, " before whom I stand, there shall 
not be dew nor rain these years, but according to 
my word." 

The message is hardly delivered before the sen- 
tence passes into execution. The next morning 
there is, as was said, no dew upon the earth. 
Ahab and his people, however, pay no attention to 
the absence of dew because they have knoAvn morn- 
ings before that had none in sight. The next 
dawn arrives with equal dryness, but still no atten- 
tion is paid to the fact, because two successive 
mornings without dew was nothing to occasion 
fear. But when a week passes by without a drop 
upon the grass, they notice that the blades begin 
to wither. They hope, however, that it is only 
one of the unusual occurrences of nature. In- 
stead, the second week continues the work of the 
first, and the trees begin to look like drooping sol- 
diers after battle. The streams begin to fall, the 
sky glows like a furnace, day after day, morning, 
noon and evening. Even the night gives no relief. 
Ever and anon a cloud is seen to form in the dis- 
tant sky and promise them relief, but it only ap- 
proaches them to pass them by and leave them 
more wretched than before. Instead of alleviat- 



THE DRY BROOK 135 

ing their distress, it only mocks them for having 
hoped. The fabled sufferings of Tantalus are re- 
duced to actual facts. The whole earth becomes 
a hard, dry cake, hot as the iron rail of summer 
time. Stream after stream dries up until at last 
the king, even the king, whose supply of water 
w^ould naturally be the last to become exhausted, 
is compelled to send servants throughout the land 
in search of water for his horses and cattle. 

While this national alarm is throwing the peo- 
ple into fear, Elijah is quietly living in seclusion 
in the east, by the side of the brook Cherith. 
After he delivered his threatening message to 
Ahab, telling him of the coming drought, the Lord 
told him to go there and hide himself, telling him 
that the brook should furnish him with water and 
the ravens with food. What a difference ! The 
king, with his thousand lords and servants trem- 
bling at the thought of dying from thirst, the 
prophet his servant, without a penny of his own, 
living like a king. Verily, there are times even 
here below when the first shall be last and the last 
first. 

But as the months come and go, Elijah notices 
that his brook Cherith also begins to fail. Will 
God neglect the man who risked his life for him.'' 
Elijah will not let himself believe it. He allays 
his apprehensions by telling himself that God is 
only testing his faith, and that after his fear has 
passed away the stream will again burst forth with 
greater swelling than it ever knew before. 



136 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

But in spite of all the coddling that Elijah gives 
his faith, the stream continues to grow less. He 
can now walk down into the very bed of the former 
stream, now he can tiptoe his way across from 
stone to stone, now it only looks like a silvery ser- 
pent winding its way slowly in and out, now like 
little globules of quicksilver left here and there in 
the deepest holes. The prophet still persists in 
his faith in God and stays though but little is left. 
But it is not long until even that little is gone. 

Then Elijah rises and goes to Zarephath, where 
he finds a widow woman gathering sticks. He 
asks her to bring him a little water and a morsel 
of food. She says, " As the Lord liveth, I have 
not so much as a cake, only a little meal in a bar- 
rel and a little oil in a cruise, and I am gathering 
these sticks to go in and prepare the meal for me 
and my son." 

Elijah answers, "Go and do as thou sayest ; 
make me a little cake first and then for thee and 
thy son, for the Lord hath said ' the barrel of meal 
shall not waste nor the cruise of oil fail until the 
day that He will send rain upon the earth.' " 

She went and did as the prophet told her, and 
she and he and her son ate many days. Thus 
ends the narrative as far as we are now concerned 
with its details. 

The question that we may want to ask and an- 
swer now is, "Why did God dry up Elijah's 
brook? " We can see why he dried up those on 
which Ahab and his idolatrous people depended. 



THE DRY BROOK 137 

He dried them up to remind them of God. They 
forgot their God, and in their folly perhaps said, 
" There is no God." Goaded on by the apparent 
prosperity of the heathen nations round about, 
the}^ fancied that they could prosper as well by 
worshipping their idol gods, and as their idolatry 
increased their spiritual eyes became more dim. 
A thick cloud came between God and them, and 
nothing but a severe punishment would remind 
them of God and His eternal decrees. So to ar- 
rest their attention and prepare them to listen to 
the prophet later and repent of their wicked ways. 
He sends them this horrible drought. But why 
did he dry up the brook Cherith where Elijah His 
prophet was ? To remind him of man. 

He dried up the brooks of Ahab to remind him 
of God; He dried up the brook of Elijah to re- 
mind him of man. Were man relieved of the suf- 
fering common to man, he would lose his sympathy 
for man, no matter how pious he himself might be. 
The immunity from suffering and want would iso- 
late man from his fellow man, as much if it came 
from God's favor as it does when it comes from 
wealth. 

We cannot understand and sympathize with the 
people when we are on a pedestal. We must 
travel the dusty highway with them, cut our feet 
on the flint that cuts theirs, scratch our hands in 
the briars that make theirs bleed, climb their hills, 
ford their streams and see our own dry up as 
theirs do. 



138 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

It was in pursuance of this principle that God 
came down in Christ Jesus to bear our burdens in 
the flesh and know from actual experience what 
mortal living is. It is in pursuance of this princi- 
ple that kings of earth sometimes travel in dis- 
guise among their people and for a while subject 
themselves to the limitations and the hardships of 
the masses. Emerson said, " We must descend to 
meet," and he never spoke with more wisdom. 

God dried up Elijah's brook to bring him down 
from his spiritual isolation to the place where the 
people dwelt. He had to know their sufferings 
and to know their sufferings he had to know their 
want. 

The subject of God's impartiality has been a 
subject that has vexed many a pious and thought- 
ful soul. 

Here is the lightning sputtering through the 
skies. That it should strike a brewery or a gam- 
bling house would not seem strange, but it strikes 
churches and hospitals just as freely. We won- 
der why. 

Here is sickness stalking through the land, lay- 
ing its hot hand on people and claiming them as 
its victim. That it should capture those who are 
bad and reckless of their health would not seem 
strange, but it numbers among its victims also 
those who are careful and needed both in the 
church and the home and the city. We wonder 
why. 

Here are great disasters, a JohnstoAvn flood, a 



THE DRY BROOK 139 

volcanic eruption, a western cyclone. That they 
should overtake those who are engaged in works of 
iniquity and take their life or their property we 
could easily understand, but the righteous perish 
alike with the wicked. Wh}^? The Bible says, 
" There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any 
plague come nigh thy dwelling, for He shall give 
His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all 
thy waj's." It says, " The righteous shall flour- 
ish like a palm tree, he shall grow like a cedar in 
Lfcbanon." 

What do these statements mean in the face of 
such indiscriminate visitations .^^ We seem to be in 
the same danger that our worldly neighbor is. 
Has God forgotten his ancient promise? No, God 
never forgets. Men may forget the vows they 
have made. Even a mother, who is all love to her 
child (and what remembers like love.'') may for- 
get some of the many promises she makes to her 
child, but God does not forget. Every promise 
that He ever made you can present to Him and 
He will honor it. But be careful that you do not 
press more into those promises than God orig- 
inally put into them. 

If a man gives me a promissory note for one 
thousand dollars I have a right to expect him to 
pay it when it matures, but if I add a cipher to the 
sum and come with a note for ten thousand dol- 
lars instead of one, I am a forger, because I am 
not presenting the note that he gave me, not the 
promise he wrote. There are many people who 



140 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

find these promises of God in the Bible, and by the 
time they present them to God they have so 
changed them that they are forged notes — prom- 
ises that God did not make at all. 

Now, we have no right to take the old observa- 
tion of Solomon, " I have been young, and now am 
old ; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, 
nor his seed begging bread," and go to God with it 
as a sight draft upon Him. It is not a promise 
of God : it is an observation of Solomon. 'Tis 
true that the observations of a man as wise and 
widely acquainted as Solomon is almost equiva- 
lent to a promise, but it is not a promise — for 
some of the righteous do beg bread and are poor 
and forsaken. David, the father of Solomon, was 
a man after God's own heart, and he said in a fit 
of great anguish, " My lovers and my friends 
stand aloof from my sore ; and my kinsmen stand 
afar off." 

Neither has one a right to go with that wonder- 
ful ninety-first psalm to God and lay it before Him 
as a promise to keep us from all harm. 'Tis true 
it sa3^s, " No evil shall befall thee, neither shall 
any plague come nigh thy dwelling," but didn't 
P. P. Bliss go over the Ashtabula bridge to his 
death? Didn't Fanny Crosby spend a long life 
in blindness? And didn't Sankey pass his latter 
days in the same ph37^sical darkness? Are not the 
missionaries of the cross the most consecrated 
people on the earth, and are not the little ceme- 
teries at the mission stations fairly dotted with 



THE DRY BROOK 141 

the graves of those who were living in the secret of 
His presence and under the protection of His 
promises ? 

Now, one of two things must be true : either God 
failed to keep them or we have put too much in 
them. The former alternative no Christian would 
dare to entertain. The latter must be true. We 
put too many ciphers to the promises of God. 
We forge his notes. The ancient promise does 
say, " No evil shall befall thee," but art thou that 
which mine eye beholds.'^ Then thou art not eter- 
nal, for in a hundred years from now thou wilt be 
dissolved and the grave-digger's spade will not be 
able to find the slightest vestige of thee. 

But thou art not that which mine eye beholds, 
thou art that which only the spiritual eye can see 
— that which will take its flight some day and 
leave the visible behind to be called by man the 
mortal remains. The essential being that you are 
is spiritual — you are a spirit with a body, and to 
that spirit the ancient promises with all of the an- 
cient richness are gloriously and everlastingly 
true " that no evil shall befall the essential you." 

The Ashtabula disaster did not kill the soul of 
Bliss. He expected to awake in Cleveland ; he 
only awoke a little farther on. The blindness of 
Fanny Crosby's eyes did not keep her soul in dark- 
ness. She lived on a Patmos such as few mor- 
tals ever dared to dream of and she caught vi- 
sions celestial as splendid as those of John the 
Apostle. 



142 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

God dried up the brook also to develop Elijah. 
Sufferings have a value apart from their social 
merits. They refine every feature of our life. 
Faith grows stronger, patience sweeter, devotion 
richer under trial. The electric bulb goes through 
no fewer than eighty processes, many of them tri- 
als of fire ; they are needful that the bulb may 
glow. The lives that shine are the lives that have 
passed through the furnace. 

The trees on the mountain and the ore in the 
earth and the ivory in the tusk are useless to man 
until the trees have been cut and the ore melted 
and the elephant hurt. After much hacking and 
planing and sawing and melting and cutting and 
bending and joining the organ appears, ready to 
reproduce everything from the human voice to the 
full orchestra. Under the mountain the zinc did 
nothing but sleep the dreamless sleep of silence ; 
in the organ it breathes the love of God as ten- 
derly as the Saviour did of old. It had to go 
through fire to do it. 

Grander than any organ is the human heart. 
The elements that make it what it is must go 
through the fire too. Jacob must lose his son, 
Joseph must lose his father, Moses must go into 
exile, Daniel into the lions' den, Jesus into the wil- 
derness, Paul into jail, Elijah to the dry brook. 

Oh, when our time comes to suffer let us remem- 
ber that no depths are below the presence of God 
and no lengths beyond the reach of His love. 
Talmage in one of his poetic flights said that an- 



THE DRY BROOK 143 

gels were once sent out throughout the universe 
to find, if they could, an end to the love and mercy 
of God. With wide spread wings they flew in 
rapid strides to the north and the south and the 
east and west, on and on, out and out to worlds 
beyond the ken of men or angels. One after an- 
other they came, weary and worn, back to the 
heavenly city, and as they reverently bowed their 
heads before the throne, they all declared, '* There 
is no end to the mercy of God." 

Oh, let sorrows like sea billows roll, I shall go 
on singing as I have always sung 

" There's a wideness in God's mercy 

Like the wideness of the sea; 
There's a kindness in his justice 

Which is more than liberty; 

" There is no place where earth's sorrows 

Are more felt than up in heaven; 
There is no place where earth's failings 

Have such kindly judgment given. 

" If our lives were but more simple 

We should take him at his word, 
And our lives would be all sunshine 

In the sweetness of our Lord." 



WHY WE LOVE THE CHURCH 

" Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house and 
the place where Thine honor dwelleth." 

Psalm 26:8. 

By the time a man has reached maturity there 
are usually a few places that are dearer to him 
than all the rest of the world. One of them is 
the house in which he was born. Mr. Bryan a 
few years ago bought his birth-house in Indiana. 
He does not intend to live in it because his inter- 
ests are elsewhere, but he doesn't want it in alien 
hands. There isn't a man living who wouldn't do 
the same if he could afford to. 

Another place that we love is the old school 
house. 

" Still sits the school house by the road, 

A ragged beggar sleeping; 
Around it still the sumachs grow. 

And blackberry vines are creeping." 

Whether our school house was by the road or in 

the town, whether we see it only once in a while or 

often, it is sacred to our memory. There isn't a 

young father or mother taking a child to the first 

school who does not see another day twenty-five 

or thirty years ago when he was taken there in the 

144 



WHY WE LOVE THE CHURCH 145 

same way, and who in seeing that picture does not 
grow mellow with tender memories. 

Another place that we love is the place in which 
we used to play. The children of today will carry 
with them into the years to come the memory of a 
well equipped playground. God bless them in 
their privileges, but if they get more fun out of 
their larger privileges than we used to get out of 
an alley where one man's barn door served for first 
base and another's on the other side of the alley 
for third, they will surely be enjoying themselves. 

How dear to my heart are the scenes of my 
childhood: the long lane, the apple orchard, the 
swimming hole, the fishing bank ! How hushed 
our voices become as we visit those sacred places 
and how tender is the conversation between us and 
the boys we used to be, as we go hand in hand 
through the years together. It brings mist to the 
eyes sometimes, but it is the mist that is tinged 
with the radiance of childhood's happy morn. 

We love also the place in which we made our 
start in business and the place in which we began 
housekeeping. The old soldier loves the place in 
which he fought for his country. Gettysburg is 
dearer to many who live a thousand miles away 
than to some who live here. Many make this field 
their annual shrine; others have come here to live. 

Then there are some very sacred places where 
the roses grow among the marble. Oh, how pre- 
cious is the sacred dust that lies like a blanket over 
the still more sacred dust beneath. While Tal- 



146 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

mage was preaching in Brooklyn one of his fami- 
lies lost two fine young sons, who were drowned in 
Lake Lucerne. The bodies had not yet been re- 
covered when the first Sunday after the accident 
came and it was not known whether they ever could 
be found. But Talmage preached upon the event 
and spoke of the great day when the sea shall give 
up its dead and when all the lost shall be found. 
" Yet," he said, " the mother of the boys told me, 
' It would be such a comfort if they could be found 
and brought home for burial. It would be like 
tucking them away for the night.' " 

David knew all about these places. He knew 
the sacredness of the grave, for he had a little boy 
in one ; he knew the sacredness of the hillsides, for 
he kept watch over his father's flocks among the 
hills of Bethlehem where a thousand years later 
the shepherds heard the angel choir; he knew the 
sacredness of the battlefield. I imagine that he 
went more than once to the brook where he found 
the pebble that slew Goliath and to the cave where 
he eluded the soldiers of Saul. He knew all about 
them. He loved many places, even as you and I ; 
but there was one place above all others that he 
loved, and that was the house of God. 

There were two things for which David was 
homesick when he was in forced exile. One was 
water from the old well at Bethlehem. " Oh, that 
one would give me water to drink of the well of 
Bethlehem which is by the gate." The other was 
the house of God, '* My soul longeth, yea even 



WHY WE LOVE THE CHURCH 147 

fainteth, for the courts of the Lord." " I was 
glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the 
house of the Lord." 

Why was the house of the Lord so precious to 
David .f^ Because of its architectural splendor .^^ 
Part of our delight in our temple comes from the 
beauty of the building. We have a room whose 
every line is pleasing to the eye, whose every color 
is soft and chaste, whose whole effect is that of 
dignity and grace. The beautiful plays an im- 
portant part in every imposing church edifice and 
it is not to be despised, for the temple that God 
built and frescoed with the sunrise, with the sun- 
set, with floating clouds and moving stars is beau- 
tiful too. 

But David did not love the house of God be- 
cause of its architectural glory. It had none. 
All that there was of the temple in David's day 
was the tent called the tabernacle : no steeple, no 
dome, no bell, no organ, no memorials, no ponder- 
ous doors, no marble stairways, no frescoes, noth- 
ing but a tent with the ark of the Covenant, and a 
few altars and the utensils. That was all that 
was visible to the eye. Why did David love this? 
Because God dwelt there. " Lord, I have loved 
the habitation of Thine house and the place where 
Thine honor dwelleth." But isn't God every- 
where ? Surely ; so is water. Water is in the 
tree, in the blade of grass, in your hand, but when 
you want a drink you go to the well or the faucet. 
So do we find God. 



148 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

Moody is a household character; his life is 
known everywhere and his influence goes to the 
remotest mountain cabin. We can read and en- 
joy and know him anywhere on this earth, but go 
to Northfield, where he was born and founded the 
great assemblies, and stand by those two mounds 
under which his body and that of his wife lie 
sleeping on Round Top and you will feel the per- 
sonality of Moody as you never did before. It 
does not matter what speakers you hear, — the 
thing that will make the deepest impression upon 
you is the great life of Moody. " He, being dead, 
yet speaketh." 

When Lincoln breathed his last, Stanton lifted 
up his head and said to those gathered about the 
bed, " He belongs to the ages." He does ; but he 
belongs a little more to you who have visited the 
White House, and the house in which he died, or 
the house in Kentucky in which he was born. 

Though spirit is not confined by granite walls 
or mountain ranges, since any time we wish we 
may take the wings of fancy and fly unto the ut- 
termost parts of the earth, yet the spirit of God, 
and man, does speak more plainly in some places 
and through some things than others. 

When I returned from Concord, made famous 
by Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau and the 
Alcotts, I showed a friend of mine, an old 
preacher, a few stones that I had picked up from 
the yards and the graves of these celebrities. He 



WHY WE LOVE THE CHURCH 149 

said, with a twinkle in his eye, " If you would have 
told me I could have given you any number of 
stones from our back yard." Yes, stones are 
plentiful, but not the kind with sermons in them. 

The spirit of God was in that tent as it is in 
the church of Jesus Christ today, and God spoke 
there to David as nowhere else in the world. That 
is wh}'^ he was glad when they said unto him, " Let 
us go into the house of the Lord." 

A man's spirit is in his word. So is God's 
spirit. Where else on earth has God's word been 
so consistently and so faithfully read and inter- 
preted through the ages as in the church? No- 
where ! The church as in the davs of David is 
teaching and preaching the old word and meeting 
God as He cannot be met at the bush or in the 
cave. 

He loved the house of the Lord because it al- 
ways lifted him. How often do the Old Testa- 
ment writers speak of men going up into the house 
of the Lord and of the Lord coming down to meet 
them. Church going is an ascent. It is an ascent 
materially. You are all better dressed than you 
were yesterday. That is an elevation in itself. 
While fine feathers do not make fine birds, yet it 
is more pleasing to look at the robin than the 
sparrow and we prefer the canary to the crow. 

It is an ascent mentally. You did not come 
here in the spirit of trade and gain, with the cares 
and the worries that attend the shop and the store 



150 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

and the factory. You came here in the spirit of 
worship, the highest attitude of which the mind is 
capable. 

Church going is an ascent socially/. If there 
were no heaven, no hell, no God, no inspired truth, 
the church, in bringing the people together Sab- 
bath after Sabbath in their best clothes, in their 
best frame of mind, to think the best thoughts 
that the mind is capable of thinking, would be do- 
ing the greatest good that any institution could do 
for man. 

The other day the youngest daughter of Victor 
Hugo died in France. When she was a young 
woman, she suddenly disappeared. All Europe 
was searched for her but she was not to be found. 
At length she came to light in New York City, 
seemingly half-dazed and half-crazed. All that 
she said was, " I am the daughter of Victor Hugo." 
How she came here no one could learn and she 
never told. She was taken back home and from 
that distant day till a few days ago, when she died 
at eighty-five, she lived a recluse. Once she was 
induced to witness a play based on one of her 
father's writings, but this she did from the dark 
corner of a private box. She seldom met friends 
and then never spoke of the past. 

That is what we all might come to but for our 
gathering in the house of the Lord. There isn't 
a life that doesn't have tragedies enough to make 
a hermit and send the victim into the cell of mor- 
bid memory. Coming into the house of God where 



WHY WE LOA^E THE CHURCH 151 

some are always happy lifts us above the damp of 
our own individual sorrow and warms us in the 
sunshine of the general felicity. David loved the 
house of God also because he had deep things ex- 
plained there. 

Asaph was one time worried about the inequal- 
ity among men : the fatness of bad men and the 
emptiness of good men. 

" I saw the prosperity of the wicked." 

" They are not in trouble as other men are." 

" Their eyes stand out with fatness : they have more 

than heart could wish." 
" They speak loftily." 
" They set their mouth against the heaven; and their 

tongue walketh through the earth." 

Thinking of this, Asaph says, " My feet were al- 
most gone, my steps had well nigh slipped." 
" When I thought to know this, it was too pain- 
ful for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God ; 
then understood I their end." 

Oh, how many things are explained in the house 
of God ! Not because of the wisdom of the 
preacher nor because the preacher happens to 
know what particular questions vex you. Have 
you never noticed how, when the preacher is mov- 
ing along one line of thought, engaged in one 
theme, you pick up a stray remark, to him entirely 
subordinate, and take it home as a precious oint- 
ment or a lighted taper? Each takes according 
to his need and according to his capacity. The 



152 REH(iIOUS RHEUMATISM 

worshiper who comes with no particular sorrow 
and no special burden can sit back and take the 
text and follow the sermon step by step as a doctor 
in a convention follows an expert. The worshiper 
comes like the patient for just one thing, relief or 
cure, and willingly waits until the preacher pulls 
down his remedy and satisfies him. 

David loved the house of God also because of its 
treasures. The most precious thing that the Jews 
ever had was in the tabernacle, the ark of the 
Covenant. It was their boast, at times their 
fetish. Thus are the cathedrals and churches of 
Christendom enhanced and loved. St. Peter's is 
said to hold the body of the very disciple who 
preached the sermon on Pentecost ; the Cathedral 
of Prague holds the body of St. John of Nepomuc 
in a silver sarcophagus. But richer far than 
those treasures that can be touched and seen and 
handled are the invisible treasures of memory. 
How deeply stirred must David's poetic soul have 
been as he thought of the historic associations of 
those treasures. 

To many a cold, sordid Jew, Aaron's rod was 
simply a stick in a chest ; to David it was the 
sceptre of God. To many the pot of manna 
meant no more than the corn in the tomb of an 
Egyptian mummy ; when David thought of it, he 
whispered softly to himself, " Thou preparest a 
table before me in the presence of mine enemies." 
In many the tables of the law awoke no more senti- 
ment than the law books in the library of an at- 



WHY WE LOVE THE CHURCH 153 

torney ; David thought of them and saw again the 
old prophet climbing the rugged sides of Sinai for 
the lamp and the light that were to guide the 
world. 

Standing before the tabernacle with its precious 
ark was to David like standing on the Alps and 
hearing the seven echoes. So is our church 
precious to us. We have no ark of the Covenant 
in our building, we have no saints entombed here, 
no nails of the cross, no relics of any kind ; but 
we have what is richer than all the treasures of 
earth, we have the treasures of a blessed memory. 

The walls of the House of Lords in England 
are covered with the paintings of former sover- 
eigns. The lords of the empire are therefore sur- 
rounded with a great host of witnesses every time 
they assemble. So are we, and what holy wit- 
nesses they are, — father, mother, sister, brother, 
wife, husband, son, daughter, the true and faithful 
who in happier days gathered with us here. These 
are the treasures that doubly consecrate a sanctu- 
ary. These are the things that lift us and cheer 
and comfort us. Fortunate is the man who has a 
church behind him. He takes something with him 
into the world that is worth more than a purse of 
gold. 

David loved the house of God also because of 
what it cost. The material of the tabernacle was 
of the best, as was the temple. God always asks 
for the best because He always gives the best. 
But the cost of the tabernacle was beyond the 



154 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

price of rubies. All things of value are. A birth 
isn't paid for when the father pays the doctor and 
the nurse. A life of devotion is the only thing 
that can ever pay for that. She who goes down 
to the gates of death to bring a new life to earth 
pays the real price and the debt to her no silver 
and gold can ever pay. 

Oh, what a price was paid for the church of 
David's day : Four hundred years in bondage, 
forty years of wandering in the wilderness, count- 
less deaths along the way, incessant warfare with 
heathen tribes en route, bitter battles even in 
Canaan. How the prophets were denounced, how 
the judges were slandered! From the hot tears 
of Moses to the broken hopes of Samuel the way of 
the spiritual leaders of Israel was thorn-hedged 
and flinty, blood stained and dangerous. The 
seers are the ones who paid the greater price. 
How great the price of our Christian church ! 
Not the tears of Paul, not the self torture of 
Stylites, nor yet the sufferings of the confessors 
and the martyrs exhaust the price of our Chris- 
tian church. Those who have suffered that we 
might worship would make the grandest proces- 
sion that this earth ever witnessed. It would 
stretch around the w^orld, traverse every country 
on the globe, go through caves and catacombs, en- 
liven the forests and dazzle the cities. The solid 
earth alone could not contain it. The Atlantic 
would have to help, for the heartaches of the May- 
flower and the Welcome and Sara Maria are among 



WHY WE LOVE THE CHURCH 155 

the most precious records of heaven ; the Pacific 
would have to help, for it alone could repeat the 
sufferings of the hundreds who have gone to its 
many isles ; the South Seas would have to give 
space for Gardner and Calvert and Paton and the 
thousands of others who struggled and prayed 
with them ; the procession would wind around Cape 
Horn, it would zigzag its way through the ice- 
bergs of Alaska, it would necklace the Alps, it 
would move through Africa from Cairo to the 
Cape ; but with all its magnitude and with all its 
splendor it would be like a cathedral without a 
dome until the hero of Palm Sunday rode at its 
head. His sufferings and His death inspired all 
others and in the all-inclusive capacity of His 
deity exceeded them in intensity and extent. He 
above all paid the price not only of our redemp- 
tion but of our church. Therefore we love it. 
It cost all that heaven had. Its price is above the 
price of rubies, hence it is more to be desired than 
silver or gold. 

But David loved the sanctuary also for the 
vision it gave him. He didn't have the high rock 
of assurance that we have in the fourteenth chap- 
ter of St. John. His boat never touched the 
shores of Patmos, neither did he ever hear that 
" this corruptible must put on incorruption and 
this mortal put on immortality " ; he was a thou- 
sand years too early for that. Yet he felt sure 
that he was going " to dwell in the house of the 
Lord forever." He was confident that though his 



156 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

little boy would never come to him again, he him- 
self would go to him. He knew this because he 
loved the sanctuary above his chief joy and there 
was led to the window that opens toward the 
shining city. Oh, how clear that city becomes to 
the saints when they gather in the house of the 
Lord! 

A tourist once asked an English farmer how far 
he could see from his highest field. He replied, 
'* On Sunday we can see clear across to Sheffield." 
" Why on Sunday ? " asked the tourist. " Be- 
cause on Sunday the mills are closed and the smoke 
is gone," replied the farmer. On Sunday we can 
see clear across to heaven from this our high field 
of devotion. Here we have reached the Chris- 
tian's Beulah land. 

" O Beulah land^ sweet Beulah land, 
As on the highest mount I stand, 

I look away across the sea, 

Where mansions are prepared for me. 

And view the shining glory shore, 
My heaven, my home forever more." 

" Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house 
and the place where thine honor dwelleth." " If 
I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand for- 
get her skill. Let my tongue cleave to the roof 
of my mouth, if I remember thee not, if I prefer 
not Jerusalem above my chief joy." 



HEAVEN 

In the midst of the Niagara River just above 
the Falls there are three small islands, joined by 
bridges and known as the Sister Islands. Along 
the edge of one of these islands there is a little pool 
or eddy into which, if you place your hand, you 
are said to render yourself deaf to all the roar of 
the mighty river above you. There you are one 
moment in the midst of the noisy, tumbling waters 
coming along with the maddened frenzy of Pande- 
monium, rumbling and tumbling, splashing and 
foaming, as though each drop were rushing con- 
fusedly to escape the wrath of some avenging fury, 
all noise and confusion about you, all noise and 
confusion within ; the next, when you stoop to 
place your hand in this little eddy, though still in 
the midst of the confusion, you are free from its 
distraction, as free as the bird in the air. 

There is in this world a Niagara of thought as 

well as a Niagara of water ; and as the latter is 

dotted with islands, so is the former. The islands 

in the river of thought are words, and among them 

there are three sister islands as beautiful as any 

that ever kissed the liquid's foam. They are 

mother, home and heaven, the sweetest words in 

any language. And as the islands in the rushing 

157 



158 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

Niagara are joined bj bridges, so are these by the 
bridges of affection. He who loves his mother 
loves his home, and he who loves home loves heaven. 
And as it is possible for one standing on the brink 
of one of Niagara's islands, if he stoop and place 
his hand in the water, to render himself deaf to 
the great confusion, so it is possible for man, when 
he stoops and places his hand in the thought of 
mother, home or heaven, to place himself without 
the distractions of the world's commotion. 

There is in every life the rush of Niagara ; our 
thoughts, our emotions follow one another in the 
quick succession of its tumbling waters and they 
sometimes almost deafen us by their confusion, 
but there is release from all to him who bathes the 
hand of meditation in the memory of his mother, 
home or heaven. The world without may do its 
worst, the world within may roar its best, he is 
deaf to all their cries and might as well, so far as 
their distractions upon him are concerned, be in 
Paradise, for he hears them not. 

We want to withdraw ourselves from the noisy 
confusion of the world without and the world 
within and dip our hands in the waters of one 
of these beautiful sister islands ; we want to 
meditate on the brink of home, and from the brink 
of home cast our eyes as tourists over to that bet- 
ter land of heaven. The languages of earth have 
many words for heaven. One calls it the Summer 
land and pours forth her soul in the melody of 
song. 



HEAVEN 159 

" Beyond the winter's storms and blights. 
Beyond the summer's shining strand, 
There waits a land of joy and light, 
O light and fadeless summer land, 

" O summer land that gleams afar 
Beyond the light of sun or star; 
O summer land, O summer land. 
We long for thee, dear summer land." 

Another speaks of heaven as a gathering of the 
faithful for the calling of the roll, 

"When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound 

And Time shall be no more. 

When the morning breaks eternal bright and fair. 

When the saved of earth shall gather over on the other 

shore. 
When the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there." 

Another conceives of heaven as a land that is 
never befogged with mists or darkened by storms, 
a land where the redeemed shall stand and know 
even as they are known. 

"We shall come with joy and gladness. 
We shall gather round the throne; 
Face to face with those that love us. 
We shall know as we are known; 
And the song of our redemption 
Shall resound through endless day, 
When the shadows have departed 
And the mists have rolled away." 

Another, going into raptures over St. John's 
description of the jasper walls and the gates of 



160 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

pearl, conceives of heaven as some resplendent city 
outshining the brightest that earth ever held. 

" Some one will enter the pearly gates, 

By and by, by and by; 
Taste of the glories that there await. 

Shall you.? Shall I .^^ 
Some one will travel the streets of gold ; 
Beautiful visions will there unfold; 
Feast on the pleasures so long foretold. 

Shall you.? Shall I?" 

Another, thinking of life as a great ocean, con- 
ceives of heaven as a welcome harbor, where the 
righteous voyagers shall finally land, and pours 
forth his soul in that beautiful song that for fifty 
years has brought peace and hope to storm-tossed 
souls. 

" Shall we meet in that blest harbor 
When our stormy voyage is o'er? 
Shall we meet and cast the anchor 
By the fair, celestial shore } " 

The pictures of heaven made by man with pen 
and brush are as many and varied as the shades 
of the summer clouds, but none of them awakens 
so much sentiment in us as the picture that Jesus 
painted when He said, " In My Father's house are 
many mansions ; I go to prepare a place for you," 
for there is no place like home on earth and noth- 
ing more to be desired in heaven than simply an- 
other and better home. What are splendid cities 



HEAVEN 161 

and spacious parks to a homesick man? What 
would the golden streets and the jasper walls mean 
to a man who did not feel at home when once within 
the walls and on the streets? 

The propriety of calling heaven a home as 
Jesus did is seen in a moment when we analyze the 
meaning of home and apply it to heaven. What 
does our home on earth mean to us ? 

It means, first of all, the place of love, a love 
that changes not with waning moons and passing 
years, a love that never grows old. Outside of 
the home love is found, but it is an affection that 
often depends for its action upon the worthiness of 
the one upon whom it is bestowed. When one is 
noble and pure, the world as naturally turns 
toward him in love as the mariner's needle turns 
toward the pole ; but when his nobility gives way to 
vice and his purity grows black with sin, the world 
just as naturally turns away. In the home it is 
not so. There love glows like a hearth fire for all 
around, whether they be sinners or saints, whether 
they be worthy or unworthy. Even so is it in 
our Father's house. There is not one who is 
worthy of God's love in heaven but Jesus and the 
angels. John in his vision from Patmos saw on 
the right hand of the throne of God a sealed book 
containing some of the mysteries of the Almighty, 
and a strong angel came forth and proclaimed 
with a loud voice, " Who is worthy to open the 
book and loose the seals thereon," and no man in 
heaven or earth or under the earth was able to 



162 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

open it. All unworthy. Yet all loved in heaven 
in spite of the unworthiness, making it truly a 
home on high. 

The propriety of calling heaven a home as 
Jesus did is furthermore seen when we remember 
that home is the place of sincerity, the natural 
fruit of genuine love. The world without has 
some sincerity in it, but when we read every day of 
the scandals in high places and low, the false fig- 
ures placed in official reports, the padded regis- 
tration of populous city wards, the fictitious en- 
tries on public ledgers, the watered stocks and em- 
bezzled funds, we are almost led to wonder whether 
sincerity does not feel like a stranger among so 
much that is foreign and insincere. These public 
scandals and insincerities, coupled with those 
smaller yet more painful insincerities of those we 
call our friends, make the world all the more in- 
hospitable to the soul that longs for open-hearted 
frankness ; but in the home it is not so. There 
we know each other even as we know ourselves ; we 
neither attempt to conceal our weakness nor fear 
to speak of our strength. A mirror does not re- 
flect more completely that which stands before it 
than soul answers soul as they appear before each 
other in the home. There is an openness there as 
wide as that of the daisy. There may be locks 
to the doors of the home, but to the doors of the 
hearts within that home there are none, they swing 
on double hinges and recede at the breath of love. 
Even so, only with a better understanding, shall it 



HEAVEN 163 

be in heaven. Then we also shall know as we are 
known and find absolute sincerity. The poison- 
ous tongue of the back biter, the envious eye of the 
jealous one, the daggered hand of the hypocrite 
that salutes 3^ou in your presence but turns with 
murder toward you in 3^our absence, shall be miss- 
ing up in heaven, for they shall have their part in 
the lake that burneth for ever and ever. Face to 
face we'll see and be seen ; our thoughts, our emo- 
tions in heaven will be as open to the heavenly 
host as the pebble strewn floor of the clear and 
crystal stream is to him who glides along on its 
liquid surface. We shall know even as we are 
known by God now. God knows us completely. 
" He knoweth our thoughts afar off," he readeth 
our prayers before they are uttered. He sees away 
down to the depths. So we shall know and be 
known, and with such a knowledge deception or in- 
sincerity of the smallest kind is impossible ; hence 
the propriety of calling heaven our home, the 
place of absolute sincerity. 

But home is more than a place of love and sin- 
cerity ; it is also the place of joy. The world 
without has happiness, but the world without has 
little joy. Happiness is the sensation of pleas- 
ure that comes to one who is temporarily relieved 
from pain or want. We see one who had a hard 
struggle with life suddenly fall into the possession 
of a fortune, and we say as we see his radiant 
face, " What a happy man he is." We see a 
flood of men come pouring out of the shop when 



164. RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

the day's work is over and we see happiness 
stamped on every face. Others with brains per- 
plexed and nerves grown tired are seen laughing 
from ear to ear at the theatre, dispelling with the 
happiness of an hour the fatigue of a day ; but 
happiness is only a passing emotion, rising up like 
a bubble flung from a pipe to soar a little, look 
beautiful and burst. It is a welcome comfort to 
the man who has left his father's house to live 
among kind strangers, but it is far from the 
deep abiding joy of a home, as far as the paste 
jewel is from the diamond or the sputtering candle 
from the stars of night. The happiness of the 
world splashes and foams like some shallow brooks, 
making noise enough to flood a farm, yet drying 
up before the summer is half gone ; the joy of home 
flows on deep and wide and noiselessly as the 
Hudson through the Palisades and the Amazon 
through the forests. 

There is a sweetness in the home as it ought to 
be that surpasses the sweetness of roses, a music 
that is richer than song, a light that is softer than 
moonbeams, a contentment that is better than a 
feast, a joy that winds its way around the heart 
as the vine around the trellis, and that makes home 
a fit comparison to the place the Saviour has gone 
to prepare, for will He not when He meets us 
greet us with, '' Come ye blessed, enter into the 
joy of your Lord." The first thing mentioned of 
our heavenly residence to you as you land on the 



HEAVEN 165 

other shore is that it is a place of jo}^ as was your 
home on earth. 

But the home is also a place of peace. No ship, 
however strongly it may be built, can long endure 
the raps of the ocean without casting anchor in 
some harbor. The winds and the waves will 
weaken it on top, the barnacles will despoil it be- 
neath. What the ship needs man needs. He 
must have some place, after battling with the world 
in the store, the office, the factory or the commer- 
cial market, where he can cast anchor and feel at 
rest. No place in the wide world gives you that 
sense of peace as does your own home. It mat- 
ters not where it is or of what material built. Be 
it a palace or a cabin, on Fifth Avenue or a moun- 
tain trail, it is your harbor. John Howard 
Payne was travelling in Venice, the city of palaces, 
when he wrote " Home, Sweet Home." They were 
grand, the homes he saw. But ever and anon as 
he would pass one after another and see its varied 
architecture and the happy faces in the windows, 
there would come up in his mind the picture of a 
little one and a half story house across the sea on 
Long Island where he was born, until at last, with 
choking in his throat and homesick sighs in his 
heart, he sat down and wrote because he had to, 

" 'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, 
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." 

He was surrounded with splendor but it gave him 



166 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

no peace when he was away, worn and tired, be- 
cause it was not his home. The splendor of the 
buildings loomed up around him as giant billows 
rise up around the ship, but what is the majesty of 
a storm to a ship that needs rest? It is mock- 
ery upon its helplessness, as those buildings were 
to Payne. Had he been able by some mysterious 
power to suddenly transport his little home from 
Long Island to Venice, we might not have the song 
that he wrote, but oh, what transports of joy 
would have burst from his eyes if he could sud- 
denly have seen it and hastened to its door. He 
would have felt like some wrecked mariner cast 
up after days of aimless drifting on the shore of 
his own dear land. Even so it is with that resi- 
dence in heaven : it gives those who enter there a 
peace that passeth knowledge. We have it al- 
ready in Jesus Christ, and if the peace He gives us 
here is so sweet, what must it be to be there, with 
the battles all fought, the struggles all over, the 
pains all endured, the disappointments all gone, 
the tears all wiped away. 

The home also suggests reunions. In the 
golden days of home life the beds are all full, the 
rooms all used, the floors strewn with toys, the 
piano keys and the window panes marked with 
baby fingers, the evening table piled with school 
books and games. But before the parents realize 
it their home is deserted. Where once the prattle 
of babies and the laughter of children made every 
moment vibrant there is now monastic silence. 



HEAVEN 167 

Where once the nutmeg grater and the bread 
board and the potato masher made frequent visits 
to the parlor there is now nothing out of place. 
But what a shell ! The music of the old-time 
voices is gone, the radiance of the dear familiar 
faces vanished. The world that paid so little for 
them has them, we the letter, the photo and the 
longing heart. 

Oh how sweet in the days of separation is the 
family gathering ! How sweet is it to the chil- 
dren, how sweeter still to the children's parents ! 
They come, those rare, glad, joyful days, like hill- 
tops whence we see the towns from which we came 
and the cities to which we are going. They al- 
ways suggest the home that was and the home that 
is to be. Which of the two receives the longer 
gaze depends upon how many of the old home are 
still here. With all here, the home on high is only 
suggested by the grey hairs and failing strength of 
the parents ; with some gone, the heavenly home 
seems just across the street. Whether, however 
jubilant with the laughter of unscarred hearts or 
tinged with the sadness of those who have loved 
and lost, the family reunions are the sweetest ex- 
perience the members of a severed family know. 

Heaven is the saints' family reunion. David 
said when his little boy died, " I shall go to him but 
he shall not return to me." Jesus said to the 
thief on the cross, " Today shalt thou be with me 
in Paradise." Many are disturbed by the fact that 
Jesus said to the Sadducees that in heaven they 



168 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

shall neither marry nor be given in marriage. 
This does not mean that kindred souls shall not be 
dear to each other there. Blood ties only end at 
the grave. Heart ties are not snapped by death, 
for love is stronger than death. Only that which 
is human in our marriage relation ends with death. 
That which is divine survives. Husband and wife 
who are one in Christ and children to whom Christ 
is always the elder brother will be more real and 
more dear to each other over there than here. 

But the reunion of the saints above will not be 
limited to the little circle that makes the family 
here. We belong to a bigger family than the one 
we live with in the flesh. " Many shall come from 
the east and the west and the north and the south 
and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob 
in the kingdom of heaven." Like elder children 
born and out in the world before the younger chil- 
dren appear, the poets, the prophets, the painters 
and the martyrs preceded us. We never saw them 
in the flesh, we never heard their voices, but they 
will be with us in the great family reunion in the 
Father's house. 

Time, like a doting father, has told us of his 
older children and we feel as though we know them, 
but there they shall tell us face to face the stories 
of their lives. Moses will tell us of the forty silent 
days on Sinai; Enoch will tell us how he rambled 
into glory ; David will tell us the story of the 
psalms ; Daniel will tell us of the night in the 
lions' den. 



HEAVEN 169 

Can you imagine yourself in the great throng 
that will crowd the Father's house, hearing the 
blessed Saviour saying, " We will now hear Paul 
on the story of his conversion," and later, " We 
will now listen to Xavier on his journey to China." 
Can you catch the thrill that will then vibrate the 
hearts of the heavenly host as Boniface and Co- 
lombo and Augustine and Luther and Wycliffe 
and Carey and Moody and Wesley rise to speak? 

We beam with a reminiscence that is mellow as 
the sunset when we hear the name of some celeb- 
rity we have heard. The true and the great will 
all be there and we shall see and hear them at their 
best, not at the cold distance of a concert hall but 
in the warm, unrestrained fellowship of home. 
They will not be to us members of another race, 
demi-gods of another era ; neither shall we be to 
them the scions of a weak, degenerate age. The 
years will be miles and we shall simply have come 
from near and far to our Father's house. 

Like every other family reunion there shall be 
one, however, whose personality shall be dominant. 
What would the gathering of all the saints amount 
to if He would not be there who went to prepare 
the place? It would be a palace without a hearth, 
a tree without foliage, a sky without a sun. We 
all want to see the loved ones with whom we walked 
the dusty miles ; we all want to see the immortals 
who went before us ; but far above and beyond all 
other cravings is the desire to see our Lord and 
Master. 



170 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

We have seen Him in the sacred page, we have 
seen Him on the artist's canvas, we have seen Him 
in the light of faith, but we want to see Him as 
He is. We have often heard Him in the multitude. 
The services of the sanctuary are the sweetest ex- 
periences we have ever known. But we want to 
know Him as the family of Bethany knew Him, we 
want to hear Him as the group at Emaus heard 
Him. Free from all the restraints of mortality 
and time, we want to grasp the nail-pierced hand 
and hear the love-filled voice of our Saviour in his 
heavenly home. 

The joy of fellowship with our Saviour will not 
obliterate the joy of fellowship with each other 
but it will subordinate it as the enjoyment of a 
soul-stirring sermon or chorus subordinates minor 
relations. We sit together in the church and in 
the concert hall, man with wife and parent with 
child, but in the raptures of the moment we are 
closest related to the one who is lifting our souls. 
So through eternity we shall be together in our 
Father's house, each real enough to each other, 
yet each entranced by his Lord. 

" Friends will be there I have loved long ago ; 

Joy like a river around me will flow; 
Yet just a smile from my Saviour, I know, 

Will through the ages be glory for me." 



BOLDNESS AT THE THRONE 

" Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the 
throne of grace." 

Heb. 4:16. 

The thrones of monarchs as well as the throne 
rooms in which they were kept have always been 
objects of greatest veneration. Why should they 
not.? The throne of England dates back to 1297, 
when Edward I had it brought down from Scot- 
land where, for many years before, the kings of 
Scotland sat upon it. Upon it have been crowned 
all the sovereigns of England from Edward II to 
the present king. Around it have gathered the 
true and the great of England for over six hun- 
dred years. It contains in its seat the famous 
old red sandstone said to have held the head of 
Jacob at Bethel when he slept and saw ,the angels 
ascending and descending between earth and 
heaven. 

The throne of Germany, presented to one of the 

former monarchs of the country by a number of 

army officers, has clustering around it the glamour 

and the glare of a thousand celebrities. It is 

made of solid silver and forms the chief object of 

attraction in one of the most gorgeously furnished 

rooms on the face of the earth. 

171 



172 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

The throne of Solomon was made of ivory over- 
laid with pure gold ; before it was a footstool of 
gold, the whole being approached by six steps, 
on either end of each being the statue of a lion, 
two such statues also standing guard at each arm 
of the throne. 

Why shouldn't men who work all year for a few 
paltry coins look with wonder upon a chair that 
is covered with the thing they seldom ever see? 
Why shouldn't they grow pensive as they look at 
a footstool of gold when' theirs is nothing but a 
brick or a stone? 

Ah, how clearly they must see today as they 
look back from the realms of light how much hap- 
pier they were with their feet upon a stone before 
the humble hearth of peace and love than the 
kings with their gold and their feuds. Add to the 
material splendor of these thrones the historical 
prestige that they had and to that the belief in 
the divine rights of kings and you will see still 
greater reason for the respect with which they were 
viewed and the reverence with which they were ap- 
proached. 

Being written in the days of thrones and crowns, 
it is not strange that the Bible should make many 
references to them and often express the things of 
God in terms of ro3^alty. Paul speaks of " the 
crown of righteousness " ; James speaks often of 
" the kingdom " ; David says, " The Lord hath 
prepared His throne in the heavens " ; and the 



BOLDNESS AT THE THRONE 173 

author of this letter to the Hebrews says, " Let 
us therefore draw near with boldness unto the 
throne of grace." 

The ancient Incas of Peru had many royal 
palaces and many throne chairs. So God in the 
Bible is spoken of as occupying many different 
thrones : David said, " God sitteth upon the 
throne of His holiness " ; in Isaiah God says, " The 
heaven is My throne, earth My footstool " ; in 
Jeremiah we read, " Jerusalem is called the throne 
of Jehovah " ; in the Psalms, " He hath prepared 
His throne for judgment." 

We are not fit even to see God on any of these 
thrones until we have first approached Him boldly 
at the throne of grace. That is the throne near- 
est us, and there is where we must meet Him first 
if we want to meet Him with pleasure on any 
other. 

And how shall we approach Him there? In 
what manner shall we come.^^ First, as alienated 
rebels to plead for pardon. Such we are until 
we are pardoned. There isn't a sinner saved by 
grace who doesn't admit it. Until he is forgiven, 
he is full of pride, and always telling himself and 
sometimes others that he is as good as many who 
are in the Church — which is not saying much, for 
there are many in the Church who never were con- 
verted — only inserted. But as soon as their sins 
are forgiven they admit with Paul that they were 
vile and sinful. 



174 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

"I was a wandering sheep; 

I did not love the fold; 

I did not love my shepherd's voice, 

I would not be controlled. 

I was a wayward child; 

I did not love my home; 

I did not love my Father's voice, 

I loved afar to roam." 

How sincerely does the genuinely converted man 
sing that hymn ! 

Approach the throne of grace as a suppliant 
for mercy, friend, if Jesus is not your personal 
Saviour. Ancient rebels came over crag and 
moor to plead for pardon from an offended mon- 
arch. Many of them were treated harshly when 
they came. When Henry IV of Germany, who 
had aroused the anger of Pope Gregory, came to 
Canosa to sue for pardon, the Pope made him 
stand barefooted in the snow, clad in sackcloth 
for three entire days before admitting him into 
his presence. 

God will not humiliate you that way, but you 
must come and fall on your knees to be forgiven. 
Don't wait until it is too late to come. In the 
days of the Scottish chiefs, the English king, 
when the rebellion was crushed, gave the chiefs un- 
til the thirty-first of December to come and ask 
for pardon. Mclan, ambitious to be the last to 
bow in submission to England, delayed starting 
south until a few days before the date. A ter- 



BOLDNESS AT THE THRONE 175 

rific snowstorm set in and made it impossible to 
reach the English king in time. When the day 
was past he arrived but only to be slain as a rebel. 
His day of grace was gone and no amount of ex- 
plaining saved him. Don't sin away your day of 
grace by waiting. The longer you wait the less 
your pardon will be worth and the more you will 
suffer for your sins. How much better would it 
have been for the South, if they would have come 
back in '63 instead of '64 — how much better if 
they would have come back in ^6^? To live in 
rebellion against God only reduces the value of 
the pardon and adds to the suffering of the rebel- 
lious. 

But having approached the throne of grace 
boldly as returning rebels, how then are we to ap- 
proach it.f^ As children. The ordinary histories 
of the nations show us the national characters 
only on dress parade. We see them only in the 
pompous functions of state — as they ride in the 
royal carriage, or receive ambassadors, or open 
Parliaments. But there are books that show us 
that the royal families are very human; that the 
kings are like other fathers and queens like other 
mothers, and that princes and princess are like 
other children. No king daddy can scare his lad- 
die with his importance. He is no more impor- 
tant to his boy than you are to yours. He will 
just as readily run his dirty hands on his father's 
silk shirt as your boy will decorate the bib of your 



176 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

overalls. He is too close to royalty to be over- 
awed by it. He is a child of the king. The king 
is his father. 

Approach the throne of grace, you professing 
Christians, with the boldness of a child. Oh, the 
boldness of a child with its parents ! What is 
more charming. They expect you to be able to 
do anything ; bind up all wounds ; heal all dis- 
eases ; comply with all desires ; buy all creation ; 
answer all questions ; forgive all transgressions ; 
bear all burdens. They run up into your arms 
with their requests as the tree runs up into the sun- 
shine with its branches and expect you to supply 
them all. We can't, of course. But it flatters 
us to have them come and we do many things that 
we never thought possible before they came. 
They have expanded our hands as well as our 
hearts, lengthened our arms, strengthened our 
hopes and quickened our steps. 

God has all the fatherly feelings that you have. 
He hungers for the same things from you that you 
crave from your children and get. How would 
you feel if that child of yours wouldn't ask you for 
anything for six months, wouldn't use the intimacy 
of your relation as father and child — simply sit 
opposite you at the table as any boarder might, 
occupy the same room with you occasionally as a 
fellow passenger might, pass you here and there 
with only the ordinary greetings of a friend. 
You would feel like an engine that had lost its 
train. You would miss the pull and you would 



BOLDNESS AT THE THRONE 177 

feel the loss. Approach your heavenly Father 
that way. He hungers for the companionship, 
for the child touch of His children. 

We are so distant from God — like children 
brought up in an Orphans' Home and hardly ac- 
quainted with Him. If He isn't as close to you 
and as familiar as your earthly father, something 
is wrong with you, not with Him. " I will redeem 
3^ou, with a stretched-out arm." There is your 
invitation. That is the way the father of the 
prodigal of old redeemed him. It is more than a 
moving hand writing a pardon that God wants to 
give you. He wants to give you also the out- 
stretched arm, — the arm of a father. Have you 
ever felt the arm of God about you? David did. 
He said, " Underneath are the everlasting arms." 

God wants you to be bold in asking, as bold as 
children are, — " Ask and it shall be given you." 
But you say, " That is not so : I have asked 
things of God that He didn't give me." Perhaps 
you did. When old Charlemagne was at the 
height of his glory, absolute monarch of prac- 
tically all of south-west Europe, his son was told 
by his playmates that he was some day to be a 
great king and rule over many lands. Anxious 
to know how many lands he was to rule over and 
how great a king he was to be, he crawled up into 
his father's lap one day and asked him. Do you 
think Charlemagne told him? No, he simply 
shook his head. The boy had other things to 
learn first. " He that ruleth his spirit is better 



178 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

than he that taketh a city." The boy had to 
learn to rule himself first before beginning to think 
about a kingdom. He gave him the same kind of 
treatment that Lincoln gave his son Robert while 
a Freshman at Harvard. Before the first year 
was more than half completed a classmate who had 
worked his way into the friendship of Robert Lin- 
coln induced Robert to write to Washington to 
his father in behalf of his own father, who was an 
applicant for a Post Office. Lincoln immediately 
wrote back, " If you don't put your mind on your 
books and keep out of politics, I'll bring you 
home." It taught him a lesson and served him 
well when others tried to use him, for he simply 
showed them the letter and that was enough. 

You see, we want to go too fast sometimes and 
this is when God says " No." He never refused 
you when you asked him for a soul. He never re- 
fused you when you asked for stronger faith, 
greater courage, for deeper devotion. He never 
refused you when you asked for anything that was 
good for you. You don't give your child a razor, 
a revolver, a hatchet, or a knife until he is fit to 
use them. Neither does God. He gives material 
things to some people. The very things you 
asked for and didn't get others get. There are 
some who can get anything from God they want. 
But they have asked for spiritual things long 
enough to assure God that they know how to 
handle material things. When once you reach 
that point when your request for material things 



BOLDNESS AT THE THRONE 179 

is absolutely unselfish, you can have anything that 
you want. George Muller, of Bristol, began an 
orphanage about sixty years ago with two shillings 
in his pocket. At his death his establishment con- 
tained five immense buildings, accommodating two 
thousand orphans whose care required one hun- 
dred and forty-four thousand dollars annually. 
During the sixty years he spent seven million dol- 
lars for buildings and support. Never once did 
he ask anyone but God for a single penny. Yet 
it all came in due time. The children never had 
to go without a meal. Often the food was not on 
hand until just before meal time. But when the 
time was fully come, the provision was fully made. 
The Lord sent the manna. What He did for 
Muller He did for Franke in Halle and for others 
elsewhere. 

God wants you to come boldly to the throne of 
grace as children with requests, — He wants you 
to feel His arms. He wants you to see Him. You 
say, no man hath at any time seen God and lived. 
I answer in the words of Jesus, " Blessed are the 
pure in heart, for they shall see God." The first 
statement means eye vision — the second, soul 
vision. Helen Keller sees more through the 
beauty of her soul than many a healthy beef-eater 
sees through his eyes ; so did Fanny Crosby and 
John Milton and Huber and others. 

But there is another way in which God wants 
us boldly to approach the throne of grace. He 
wants us also to approach the throne of grace as 



180 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

guards. There comes a time when the children 
of the king are expected to defend the throne as 
well as petition it. Every king, whether magnan- 
imous or tj'^rannical, has the assassin's hand with- 
in his realm and the nation's foe without, against 
which he must be constantly on guard. To no one 
should the king be able to look with more con- 
fidence than to his sons. How nobly the sons of 
the Kaiser rallied to their Imperial Father. 
Before the declaration of war was dry upon the 
page, the princes of the royal family of Germany 
were in uniform and on their way with the nation's 
defenders to the front, not to direct the move- 
ment of the men from a distant fort or tent but to 
fight with them in the ranks and bleed with them, 
as some of them have since had to do. They bear 
in their hearts the spirit of the old royalist of 
England who called his sons to his bedside in the 
closing days of Cromwell and said to them, " Sons, 
stand by the crown though it hang on a bush." 
The story of this man drawing a wall of human 
daring around the throne of earthly monarchs is 
a picture that the sons of God should hang on 
memory's wall and often visit. Approach the 
throne of grace w^ith the boldness of a guard. Be 
somebody worth while even though your strength 
is small. Remember that you have a share in the 
protection of the throne of Almighty God. Stand 
between the warring world and God as the sons of 
kings are standing between their father and their 
father's foes ; as Lilla stood between Eadwine and 



BOLDNESS AT THE THRONE 181 

Eumer of Wessex. When Eumer approached the 
throne of Eadwine to read a communication from 
Wessex, he pulled from the folds of his clothing a 
dagger and thrust it at the heart of the king. 
Lilla, his body-guard, catching the glint of the 
steel, rushed between the assassin and the king. 
His body was pierced but the king escaped with a 
scratch. Paul said, " I die daily." He died not 
only to human lusts but he died in the defence of 
God. The same duty is ours. The same God 
calls us. The same throne challenges us. Rush 
between the world and God, save God's name, save 
His honor among men, save His work. 

God calls us, furthermore, to approach the 
throne of grace as partakers of the throne. 
Earthly kings are jealous of their thrones. In 
1889, when Prince Rudolf of Austria was mysteri- 
ously slain. Emperor Francis Joseph, his father, 
wrote to the Pope, " Holy Father : Please de- 
cide whether my poor boy is to have a Christian 
burial or not. I ask no favor as for myself ; I am 
resolved to abdicate." That was over a quarter 
of a century ago, and he is still upon his throne. 
Kings do not even like to think of sharing the con- 
fidences of their throne with their heirs. When 
the artist asked one of Germany's former Kaisers 
for the privilege of painting a royal scene about 
the silver throne of Germany, the Kaiser gave his 
consent upon condition that the artist would show 
him the sketch before proceeding with the paint- 
ing. The sketch showed the Kaiser upon the 



182 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

throne with the heir standing beside him having a 
foot upon the lowest step of the throne. The 
Kaiser scanned the sketch, took his pencil from his 
pocket and put the foot that was on the step of 
the throne upon the floor with the other and wrote 
beneath these words, " Unser Fritz, noch nicht." 
Not so is God. He wants to share His throne 
with us. 

God is love and love always divides. God wants 
us to share with Him the glory of His throne. 
" He hath called you unto His kingdom and 
glory." He wants to share with us the councils of 
His throne. " Unto you is given to know the mys- 
tery of the kingdom of God." " The secrets of 
the Lord are with them that fear him." 

He wants us to share with him the power of 
his throne. " Ye shall receive power after that 
the Holy Ghost is come upon you." He wants 
us to live like kings and be kings. Christ through 
his blood has made us " kings and priests unto 
God." Do you feel the thrill of joint sovereignty 
with God? 

A dirty hod carrier was mixing his mud and 
singing, " I'm the child of a King." A cynic 
stopped and said, " And who's the king? " The 
hod carrier made no reply but continued, 

" My father is rich in houses and lands, 

He holdeth the wealth of the world in His hands." 

That man was on the throne with God. The 
old heaven and the old earth had passed away and 



BOLDNESS AT THE THRONE 183 

a new heaven and a new earth had appeared. 
Though humble as he was devout, he knew that he 
was " every inch a king," and he was not going to 
let either a mortar bed or a fool drive him out of 
his kingdom. 

Oh, for more royalty in religion ! Let us quit 
being servitors and begin to be kings and queens. 
If He made us only a little lower than the angels 
and crowned us with glory and honor, why should 
we cringe and crawl? 

" Two prisoners looked out through their prison bars; 
One saw mud^ the other saw stars." 

Look up, " hitch your chariot to a star," com- 
mune with the Infinite, be a friend of God. Ap- 
proach the throne of grace as one of its occupants. 
Why not.^ He has committed a whole world to 
your hands. If the cattle on a thousand hills are 
His the people on a million plains are yours, — 
yours to teach, yours to guide, yours to save, 
yours to bless. Never in all the ages did the most 
indulgent sovereign grant to a child one thou- 
sandth of the empire that the King of all kings has 
granted to you. Be true to your trust. Be as 
big as your task. Walk worthily of your calling. 

It ill becomes kings to waste their time on trifles. 
When Dutch William was sailing with a hostile 
fleet up the Thames the English king was running 
pins through butterflies. 

" We are not here to play, to dream, to drift. 
We have work to do and loads to lift." 



184 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

Oh, let us enlarge and glorify the kingdom. To 
approach the throne of grace boldly as one of its 
occupants and to be worthy to partake of the 
throne and be a friend of God we must constantly 
work for the Kingdom. 

" My Father worketh hitherto and I work." 



THE RESURRECTION BODY 

" With what manner of body do they come? " 

I Cor. 15:35. 

The grave is a cave until Jesus has explained it. 
Paul had as much of the explanation as it is given 
to mortal minds to have. In Jerusalem and else- 
where he had heard of the resurrection of Christ; 
on the Damascus road he had met the risen Lord 
himself. He knew his power. To Paul the risen 
Lord was mightier than the Galilean. The Gali- 
lean could not budge him ; the risen Lord struck 
him to earth. The grave had robbed him of noth- 
ing but his weariness and his pain. To Paul the 
grave was nothing but a wayside inn for pilgrims 
on their way to Jerusalem. 

But Paul was writing to a handful of Christians 
who were born and reared in a place where death 
was the king of terrors and the grave his bone- 
strewn cavern. The departed were spoken of as 
shades and the faith that conceived of them as 
shades was shadier even than those shades. Some 
did not even admit any existence after death. 
Heraclitus said, " Man is kindled and put out like 
a lamp in the night time." 

The flower of Grecian manhood, the nearest ap- 
proach to Christ, Socrates the golden, said, at the 

185 



186 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

conclusion of his defence before the Athenian court, 
" The time has come for us to depart, I to die, 
you to live. Which of us is going to a better lot 
God alone knows." Absolute unbelief or uncer- 
tainty characterized the Grecian mind. Corinth 
was a Grecian city and the members of the Cor- 
inthian church had some of the inherited super- 
stition of Greece in them. To remove it and to 
give them the truth, as well as the comfort that ac- 
companies the truth, Paul devoted part of his 
first letter to them to the resurrection and the 
resurrected body. Never did man commit a more 
joyful message to posterity, save perhaps John, 
when he dipped his pen in the crimson fountain and 
wrote, " God so loved the world that He gave His 
only begotten son that whosoever believeth in Him 
should not perish but have everlasting life." 

To comfort our souls we shall take the old ques- 
tion of Paul and answer it in the light of revela- 
tion. 

We all know that the soul will live on. It has 
lived on through a succession of bodies and main- 
tained its identity. But many of us are not very 
clear about the resurrection of the body. Many 
of us are plodding along with the feelings of Ella 
Wheeler Wilcox, when she said : 

" Those hands that toiled or held the books I read, 
Those feet that trod where'er I wished to tread, 

Those lips through which my prayers to God have 
risen, 
Those eyes that were the windows of my prison: 



THE RESURRECTION BODY 187 

From these, all these, Death's Angel bids me sever ; 
Dear Comrade Body, fare thee well forever ! " 

Others are sadly thinking of their body as seed 
grain from whose mould shall rise the body that is 
to be. 

Friends, the Word does not so teach. " When 
He shall appear we shall be like Him." How shall 
He appear ? Listen to the voice at the ascension : 
" This same Jesus which is taken up from you into 
heaven shall so come in like manner as ye have seen 
Him go into heaven." The resurrected body of 
Christ is therefore a demonstration of what our 
body will be like. Let us therefore spend a little 
time studying the resurrected body of Christ, " the 
first fruits of them that slept." 

We are all acquainted with Him as He was 
when He talked to the Doctors in the temple, as 
He was when He sat in the boat and taught, as 
He put his hands on the eyes of the blind and on 
the ears of the deaf and the tongue of the dumb. 
The picture of him prostrate in Gethsemane and 
agonizing upon the cross and limp in the hands of 
his friends are all familiar to us. But of his risen 
body we know very little, simply because we per- 
sist in thinking of it as it was before the death on 
the cross. 

The body that went into the tomb was a natural 
body. It had the hungers and appetites and or- 
ganic functions of the flesh. That which came 
from the tomb was a spiritual body, without the 



188 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

hungers and appetites and organic functions of 
the flesh. On the cross He cried, " I thirst." He 
never spoke of or acted as though He were hungry 
or thirsty after the resurrection. It is true He 
ate broiled fish with his disciples after his resur- 
rection, but this He did not because He was hun- 
gry but to prove that He was their resurrected 
Lord and not a spirit. His body was so spiritu- 
alized and so purified that they took Him for a 
spirit. If you ask me what became of the broiled 
fish that He ate, if He had no more the organic 
functions of the flesh, if the salivary glands no 
more secreted, the gastric juices no more flowed 
and the whole digestive process had ceased, I 
answer, when you tell me whence came the five 
thousand loaves that fed the multitude, I will tell 
you what became of the fish that the Saviour ate. 
The one involved a miraculous accumulation, the 
other a miraculous elimination, both easy for God. 
" That which is sown is natural, that which is 
raised is spiritual." In the process of resurrec- 
tion the appetites and organic functions of the 
flesh are fused like the carbon thread of the electric 
bulb into a glow of divine light. They were not 
sloughed off like the skin of the serpent, for noth- 
ing was left in the tomb. All was glorified. The 
body that went into the tomb was bound by the 
laws of the material world, gravity held it down, 
nails made it bleed, walls and doors kept it out, 
the sun flushed it, the rains drenched it. But it 
was not so with the resurrected body. 



THE RESURRECTION BODY 189 

It was as free from the limitations of the ma- 
terial world as the soaring eagle is free from the 
fences and the hills of the lowlands. When the 
disciples came to the tomb on the morning of the 
resurrection thej found the grave clothes in which 
Christ had been wrapped lying there fold upon 
fold. They were not lying carefully folded as 
your napkins and your newly ironed bed linens 
but folded as they were while still around his body. 
Yards and yards of linen were used to enswath 
the Saviour's body. It encased him in bands 
horizontally wrapped, it went bandage-wise from 
shoulder to hip and from hip to shoulder, it en- 
cased His limbs, it enclosed His head. Sprinkled 
profusely among the folds were the spices to pre- 
serve the body, at least a hundred pounds of them. 
He was more completely bandaged in complicated 
folds than any hospital patient ever was. Yet so 
spiritualized was His body in the process of resur- 
rection that He came out from that encasement of 
spice and linen without disturbing a single fold. 
The Greek Testament tells you so. The encase- 
ment lay there when the disciples came to the tomb 
just as it lay there when the Saviour's body was 
in it, with perhaps the exception of being the least 
bit flattened by the departure of its occupant. 
Had the linen been nicely folded in a pile at the 
head of the slab, it would have proved that Christ 
was not in the tomb but it would not have proved 
his resurrection. The disciples might have come 
and taken his body away and buried it elsewhere 



190 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

and folded the grave clothes thus. But nothing 
but the power of Almighty God could withdraw 
that body from its burial encasement without dis- 
turbing so much as a single fold. 

His freedom from the limitations of the material 
world is further seen in His first meeting with His 
disciples after the resurrection. It is the first 
Easter evening; the disciples are shut up in a 
room in Jerusalem for fear of the Jews. They 
knew not what moment the door would be battered 
in and they themselves dragged out to Calvary. 
When the thirst for blood takes hold of a people it 
is hard to say at what crime they will stop. While 
they are fearing and praying and hoping and 
quaking Jesus suddenly appears in their midst. 
The Bible does not say that He came miraculously 
through the door, but John says that the doors 
were shut and Luke says that they were terrified 
and affrighted and supposed that they had seen a 
spirit. Such a fright would hardly have fallen 
upon them if He had been ushered in through the 
window or some unusual opening. The inference 
is that they were frightened because He suddenly 
came through that which keeps flesh and blood 
out. It may be that He came through the door 
or through the wall. The one was as easy to 
pass through as the other, because it was a spirit- 
ual body that He had and not a natural body. 
This may seem weirdly strange and almost grue- 
some but it is a fact that can be scientifically dem- 
onstrated. The X ray is refined matter. It can 



THE RESURRECTION BODY 191 

go through a steel plate without showing you on 
one side or the other where it went through and 
can reveal what is on the other side. 

The freedom of Christ's resurrected body from 
the limitations of the material world is also seen in 
His ascension forty days after the resurrection. 
Standing on the mount of Olives and talking with 
His disciples, He quietly, gracefully and sacredly 
lifted up His hands in blessing upon them and 
slowly rose from them until a cloud received Him 
out of their sight. This would not have been pos- 
sible to a body such as we have now, not to such a 
body as Christ had before His death, for his body 
was a natural body, gross, dense, heavy. But 
when it was raised a spiritual body it was as easy 
to travel in one direction as in another. That is 
true of all matter. The more you refine it the 
freer you make it. Here is water, a liquid ; it is 
so heavy and so bound to earth that it moves only 
down hill. Refine it by heating it into steam and 
it wdll move in any direction and in one as easily 
as in the other. Here is wood, more dense even 
than water. It is so dense that it will not even 
move down hill but only drop toward the center of 
the earth. Refine it by burning it into gas and it 
will go as lightly toward the sky as thought. 
That which is refined wears no chains. It is seen 
in many material things that have been refined. 
It was seen in Christ. 

But in our admiration of Christ's spiritual 
body, possessed of such wonderful powers, let us 



192 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

remember that it was in the process of spiritualiza- 
tion even before death. He walked on water, 
which was contrary to the laws of nature, and was 
glorified at the transfiguration with a glory that 
was entirely foreign to man. While His was a 
natural body before death, it was so completely 
under the control of His noble spirit that at times 
it rose above the realm of the natural and antici- 
pated the resurrection for a few brief moments. 
He had such a wonderful spiritual body after His 
resurrection because He had such a spirit filled 
body before it. 

This leads us to the consideration of our bodies 
at the resurrection. With what body shall we 
come? We too have a promise of a resurrection. 
It is not promised on the third day. It may not 
be until after a thousand years have come and 
gone. Maybe the capitol at Washington will be 
as hazy in the memory of man as the buried cities 
on the plains of Shinar before we shall be called 
from the grave. We may be of the hard-packed 
clay that blankets the earth centuries upon cen- 
turies before the summons will come. But some- 
where in the future lies a day when all the graves 
will be opened and all the vaults unlocked, when 
the graveyards will look like plowed fields and 
Westminster like a stone quarry. 

With what body shall we come ? " It is sown a 
natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." Does 
that mean that the body that goes into the grave 
will come out of the grave spiritualized and glori- 



THE RESURRECTION BODY 193 

fied? It must or it would not be a resurrection. 
It is true, some refer to Paul's statement of a 
grain of wheat falling into the ground and send- 
ing up new grains as it dies as a description of the 
resurrection. But it is not a description, only an 
illustration, the best he could find to make such a 
mysterious thing as the resurrection intelligible. 
The germination of a grain of wheat is not a 
resurrection, it is merely a propagation of new 
life. The grain that comes up is an exact dupli- 
cate of the grain that went down, neither better 
nor worse. The body that comes up is a thousand 
times better than the body that went down. " It 
is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual 
body." 

It is true that the blind man does not care to 
think of the resurrection of his sightless eyes, nor 
the consumptive of the resurrection of his wasting 
lungs, but the spiritual body will be without im- 
perfections. " It is sown in corruption, it is 
raised in incorruption." " It is sown in weakness, 
it is raised in power." Oh how precious those 
words have become to the ministers of Jesus 
Christ, after repeating them beside the lowered 
forms of so many of their brethren and sisters in 
Christ ! 

Sometime between the funeral dirge and the 
trumpet of the Lord the soul will rush back for its 
old comrade of the sod and kiss it into a divine 
glory. By a miracle no less wonderful than the 
creation of man himself God will take that which 



194? RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

was sown in weakness and raise it in power and it 
shall have the same qualities and powers that the 
resurrected body of Jesus had, for the word de- 
clares that when He shall appear we shall be like 
Him. John says, " It doth not yet appear what 
-we shall be, but when He shall appear we shall be 
like Him for we shall see Him as He is." Very 
significantly does he add : " And every man that 
hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He 
is pure." 

If you want to be raised a spiritual body, hav- 
ing the freedom from disease and natural limita- 
tions and know the buoyancy and power that Jesus 
had after His resurrection, you must do what He 
did to win it: bring the body under subjection of 
the spirit and begin the spiritualizing process 
here. You must do what John says : " Purify 
3^ourselves." 

It may not be possible for you to walk upon the 
water as Jesus did, but it is possible for your spirit 
to gain the ascendancy over the body so that 3^ou 
can walk upon your passions and appetites with- 
out sinking, which is as great a miracle. This is 
an absolutely essential preliminary to a resurrec- 
tion such as Jesus underwent. That only can be 
spiritualized which has the spiritual germ in it. 
Live the life of gross carnality and lust and you 
will come from the tomb heavy as lead ; live the life 
of purity and love and you will come forth as your 
Master did, radiant as the morn, warm as the sun- 



THE RESURRECTION BODY 195 

beam, buoyant as the eagle, strong in undiminish- 
ing and everlasting power. 

Purify yourselves from day to day, then when 
He comes to claim His own He will change our 
poor vile bodies mouldering in the grave " that 
they may be fashioned like unto His glorious 
body." 



THE STICK AND THE AXE 

" And he cut down a stick and cast it in thither and made 
the iron to swim." 

II Kings 6:6. 

Many years ago the school of the prophets be- 
came too small for the number of students. In- 
stead of bringing the board of trustees together to 
devise ways and means for raising funds to enlarge 
the quarters, it led some of the students to do 
what, if done today, would give the president of 
such an institution a fit. They came to Elisha, 
the President of the Seminary, and said : " Let 
us go to the Jordan and take thence every man a 
beam and let us make there a place where we may 
dwell." 

One of two things was true then that is not true 
today : either theological students were better me- 
chanics then than they are now or they lived in 
simpler buildings. The latter probably was true, 
for while one of them was felling a beam his axe- 
head flew off into the water. A mechanic would 
likely have examined his axe before beginning to 
swing it. No sooner had it fstllen into the water 
than he exclaimed : " Alas, my master ! for it was 
borrowed." If he wasn't a good mechanic, he was 
an honest man. If every one were as conscien- 
tious about borrowed things we wouldn't be able 

196 



THE STICK AND THE AXE 197 

to walk down street for the borrowed umbrellas 
that would be flying back and forth to their orig- 
inal owners, and what swarms of books would there 
be homeward bound and what dress patterns and 
wheelbarrows and hatchets and saws ! 

The Bible enjoins us to be our brother's keeper 
but it has not appointed us his assignee. So if 
you have borrowed your neighbor's goods and 
have turned the loan into joint ownership, quit 
singing " Loving kindness, oh how free," and show 
some. You can't be leaning on the everlasting 
arm very hard while you are leaning on your 
neighbor's everlasting hoe. 

The student thought the axe was gone forever 
because the water was deep. But Elisha had a 
double portion of Elijah's spirit and he calmly 
walked to a tree, cut down a stick, cast it upon 
the water and brought the axe up. 

Does this tax your faith .^^ If someone had told 
you twenty years ago that a pile of steel and alu- 
minum and canvas weighing five hundred pounds 
would rise without a pulley into the sky, one mile, 
two miles, what would you have said.'^ Now you 
read it with no more sensation than you feel when 
you read a train schedule. Is it harder to believe 
that a man of God could bring a few pounds of 
iron thirty or forty feet than that an aviator can 
lift five hundred pounds of metal and canvas two 
miles into the sky.^^ Not for me. You say the 
one conformed to the laws of nature, the other did 
not. How do you know.? 



198 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

When the Wright brothers began their experi- 
ments wiseacres said : " It is preposterous that 
anything heavier than air should rise unaided into 
the air." They didn't know that air is as rigid as 
steel when struck rapidly enough. Before you 
say that Elisha didn't conform to the laws of na- 
ture be sure that you know them all. We are 
learning more every day and only the fool knows 
it all. 

But even if he did not conform to the laws of na- 
ture, he was the ambassador of God, the maker of 
nature and all of nature's laws, and could there- 
fore, with his authority, rise above those laws and 
do something by special provision. The kaleido- 
scopic changes of Europe, the most rigidly ruled 
of all continents, show that no laws are above spe- 
cial contingencies. 

But the physical miracle by which the axe was 
brought up by a stick must not detain us. We are 
on the way to something better, the spiritual ap- 
plication of the ancient miracle. All these sto- 
ries of the marvelous dealings of God in bygone 
ages are given for a two-fold purpose: first, for 
historical enlightenment ; second, for instruction 
and help. Recreant would we be indeed if we 
whittled away our time analyzing the historical 
event. What does this event mean to us today .f* 
What help is there in it for the man who tomorrow 
will follow the plow, the machine, the ledger, the 
woman who will be bending over the sink, the tub, 
the ironing board, the sewing machine ^ 



THE STICK AND THE AXE 199 

The stick is beyond all doubt a symbol and a 
prophecy of that other piece of wood that centu- 
ries later was cut from another tree and thrown on 
the turbulent river of human sorrow. In cold his- 
toric narration we are told that it was raised on 
Calvary and tamped in the solid earth, but in 
spiritual allegory it was cast upon the waters of 
humanity's needs to bring up the axe. 

And what is the axe? The heavy things of life, 
the lost things, the submerged things. The axe 
that Elisha's stick brought to the surface sym- 
bolizes, first, humanity's moral degeneracy. 

The European war has thrown many who were 
optimistic about our civilization into a pessimistic 
mood and many are today where Hamlet was when 
he said the times were out of joint and everything 
rotten in Denmark. But we must not let a big 
collision blind us to the long years of development 
through which humanity has come. Railroad col- 
lisions do not make us wish for the stage coach, 
the broken bridge does not discredit the thousands 
of whole ones. In spite of this suicidal war the 
world is ten thousand times a better place to live 
in than it was in the days of Caesar, Pericles, or 
Pharaoh. In their days the morality of the world 
was a sunken axe. Kings captured wives as cow- 
boys captured wild cattle on the western prairies, 
and no one raised a hand in protest except, per- 
haps, the husband of the stolen wife and some- 
times he did not. Imagine a President of the 
United States picking out a wife from a Phila- 



200 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

delphia audience, from a Pittsburg, a Chicago, a 
Denver crowd and telling his secret service men to 
escort her to his train. Imagine any civilized 
ruler doing that today. We cannot conceive of it 
even as a possibility. What makes it impossible 
to conceive as a possibility? The stick that was 
thrown above the sunken morality of humanity, 
the cross of Jesus Christ. Where the cross has 
not cast its shadow over society, kings still have 
their harems and womanhood is still debased, 
which of course means that the home is nothing 
more than a legalized brothel. 

The saving influence of the cross in the marriage 
relation is typical of the saving influence of the 
cross in every relation, the parental relation, the 
social relation. The inner relations of personal- 
ity have also been lifted and glorified by the over- 
shadowing of the cross. 

As the cross has brought up the sunken moral- 
ity of the world, so it has brought up also the 
sunken industrialism of the world. 

From the beginning of time the strong have 
shown a tendency to burden and oppress the weak. 
Hood, the poet, describes it in the " Song of the 
Shirt " ; Markham describes it in " The Man with 
the Hoe." 

Others describe it in other ways. When labor- 
saving machines came into existence every one ex- 
pected to see the hardships of labor diminished 
and the condition of the laborer alleviated. Why 
not from labor saving devices? But they forgot 



THE STICK AND THE AXE 201 

that labor saving machines only give human greed 
greater opportunity to oppress. The change of 
method did not change the heart, and so the con- 
dition remained unchanged or grew worse. The 
nimble little children were put behind the nimble 
spindles and shuttles, and girls and boys who 
should have been in school and some of them more 
properly at their mother's side were run into fac- 
tories and blighted like the rose, before they had 
fairly begun to bloom. 

It is not so today. Inch by inch the stern 
hands of the law are tearing child labor and heart- 
less employer apart and sending the children into 
the schools and out into the sunshine where they 
ought to be. Many states absolutely forbid child 
labor until late adolescent life and others provide 
a limited amount of schooling for the factory child 
who has passed the minimum age. What great 
force lies back of all these progressive industrial 
movements? But one thing: the determination of 
Christian men. Men with jaw-bones and back- 
bones are replacing cuttle fishes and angle worms 
in our legislative halls and our executive chairs. 

The cross of Jesus Christ, the stick of wood, 
has lifted the industrial world to where it is to- 
day. When Billy Sunday went to Paterson the 
socialistic labor leaders said to the people, " Billy 
Sunday will put you to sleep industrially," their 
contention being that the gospel that he preaches 
is too personal for this highly associated age of 
ours. But tell me, pray, how much would have 



202 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

been done for this organized age of ours if men at 
the head of affairs had not had a strong personal 
religion to hold them to their convictions? If you 
want to know why Pennsylvania has such good 
child labor laws today you must go back to a mod- 
est home in central Pennsylvania where father and 
mother Brumbaugh taught their growing child to 
be personally pure, personally upright, personally 
devout. If you want to know why New York 
state is purged of her gambling at Saratoga you 
must go back to the parsonage in which Charles E. 
Hughes was taught the way of righteousness and 
to the old white-haired father who, when the fight 
was on between his son and a vice-protecting legis- 
lature, prayed that " Charles would be given grace 
to win the day." 

Social righteousness ! There is none without 
personal piety. The latter is the child of the for- 
mer. " Simply to Thy Cross I Cling " always 
precedes " Onward, Christian Soldiers." The 
overshadowing of the cross of Jesus Chirst has 
brought up the industrialism of the world, first, by 
bringing up the personal life of those in authority 
and second, by bringing together those who have 
been brought up, into a concerted action. The 
cross of Jesus Christ also brings up the sunken 
ambitions of life. 

How youth swings the axe of ambition ! It is 
like a breeze from the ocean to attend a graduation 
exercise and hear the graduates tell of all the 
things they are going to do and doubly refreshing 



THE STICK AND THE AXE ^03 

to hear how soon they are going to do them. 
If you were to land here on the latest train from 
Mars and knew nothing of this old world with its 
perverse and crooked generations, you might ex- 
pect to see the whole thing cleaned up in a year. 
With a few apologies to Whittier we may well re- 
peat, 

Blessings on thee, my hopeful man, 
With barefoot faith and rosy plan; 

From my heart I wish thee joy; 
I was once a graduate boy. 

Alas, alas, for the dreams of graduation night ! 
Before a year rolls by most of them are plucked 
and singed and basted like a turkey ready for the 
oven. It is well that most of them are, for they 
are worth more that way than any other. 

But the tragedy comes in the lives of those who 
lose their ideals entirely, who slump into a phys- 
ical, mental and spiritual indifference, who lose the 
axe. What will recover it for them? Nothing 
but the cross of Jesus Christ. Sometimes you can 
brace up a derelict by a little rebuke, sometimes by 
a little persuasion, sometimes you can prod him 
by telling him of men who came back ; but these 
things are temporary and unsatisfactory. The 
thing that the man of lost ideals needs is the abid- 
ing presence of him who never lost an ideal. The 
helping hand of a brother is the best thing the 
earth knows for a fallen man, but earth holds not 
the secret of man's redemption. Heaven revealed 



204 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

that, and when it came its symbol was not a human 
hand but a divine cross. Ananias, who laid his 
hand on Paul in the dark room of Damascus, who 
taught him and baptized him, was a true benefac- 
tor to Paul and the hand that gave him his sight 
was worthy of any pilgrim's kiss, but when Paul 
came out to tell the story of his conversion he 
gloried in the cross of Christ and not in the hand 
of Ananias. It is always so. The men who wal- 
lowed in sin and threw their health and friends and 
homes and peace away like worthless rags, to ply 
their sinful orgies and who now rise up in tent and 
tabernacle, chapel and mission to tell their sto- 
ries all point to the cross of Jesus Christ as the 
means of their salvation. The cross also raises 
the burden of years. 

When life is young and the heart is gay we wear 
our years as the bird wears the feathers on its 
wings. There is no burden when you are " knee- 
deep in June." Everything is redolent, buoyant 
and happy. But when the eternal snows begin to 
drive the crows from your head and speech be- 
comes halting and memory begins to leak like an 
old boiler and the hands that used to sweep in 
Spencerian grandeur leave marks on the paper 
like the marks of birds' feet in mud and the eye 
that sparkled like a mountain lake grows hazy as a 
dusty window and the ears that heard the slight- 
est whisper miss the words that were sent directly 
to them and the feet slip loosely in the 'slippers, 
there steals into the heart an uncomfortable feel- 



THE STICK AND THE AXE 205 

ing of loneliness and sometimes intrusion. The 
old zest is gone, the axe is fallen, the pitcher is 
broken, the spokes rattle, the roof leaks, the tree 
is leafless and limbless. What a picture of desola- 
tion without Christ ! What a picture of peace 
where Christ abides ! The difference between a 
Christless age and a Christ filled age is the differ- 
ence between red and grey. 

Years ago we saw an artist sketch a cabin in a 
field of snow. The roof, the window ledge, the 
tree close by were covered with all the snow they 
would hold. 

" The bridle post an old man sat, 

With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat. 

No cloud above, no earth below, — 
A universe of sky and snow." 

To look at it made one shiver. With one quick 
sweep of the crayon the artist put a few lines of 
red on the window and in the sky. The miracle 
was done. The red on the window told you of a 
hearth fire within and the red overhead of a sun 
in the sky. Age, with Christ in the heart, is a big 
arm-chair before the fire. The cross takes all the 
burden away ; it lifts the axe and gladdens the 
heart. When Jesus abides with us toward eve- 
ning everything becomes sweeter as the years go 
by. " To live is Christ, to die is gain." 

The cross also lifts the heart of man from the 
billows of death. 

Never is the heart heavier than when a loved one 



206 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

is taken by death. In my mother's diary I read 
the entry : " When Paul died it seemed as though 
my heart was torn from my bosom." That was 
thirty years ago. She has since gone to be with 
Paul and with Harry, who went before him. 
There are other mothers, however, who are still 
lingering. Only God knows how many journeys 
they have made to the little house beneath the sod. 
The old love has never waned. They still talk 
with them, croon over them, love them. Oh, how 
they love them in memory's mellow light ! But 
the heart is not as heavy as it used to be. There 
is less weight in the shoes, there are fewer tears in 
the eyes. The sweetness of resignation has filled 
the soul with a peace that passeth knowledge. 
The eyes that were once so dim shine like the win- 
dows of a mountain inn at sunset. The axe is 
lifted. What brought it up.'' The cross on 
which the conqueror of death and the grave died. 

When David's little boy died, he lay on the floor 
like one dead and mourned for thirty days. He 
knew not the open tomb of the garden. 

I saw an aged minister stand beside his son's 
casket and sing, with the congregation, " Nearer 
My God to Thee." None sang more devoutly or 
more firmly than he. He had passed from death 
unto life. Like his master, he was " no more in 
the world." 

" Alas for him who never sees 

The stars shine through his cypress trees ! 
Who^ hopeless^ lays his dead away, 



THE STICK AND THE AXE 207 

Nor looks to see the breaking day 
Across the mournful marbles play ! " 

O glorious cross that points to the highest 
heaven and the farthest grave ! If somewhere in 
the future it shall please God to carry to the sky 
some symbol of earth, as legend tells us the Holy 
Grail was taken, let it be Thy precious self, on 
which the guilt of the world was nailed, from 
which the love of heaven was given, by which the 
gates of death were opened ! 

" In the cross of Christ I glory^ 
Towering o'er the wrecks of time; 

All the light of sacred story 

Gathers round its head sublime. 

" Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure, 

By the cross are sanctified; 
Peace is there that knows no measure, 

Joys that through all time abide." 



BETWEEN TWO GRAVES 

" He being dead yet speaketh." 

Heb. 11:4. 

(This sermon was delivered in the National Cemetery at Gettys- 
burg, where Lincoln delivered his immortal address and where over 
three thousand Union soldiers, over nine hundred of them unknown, 
lie buried. The occasion was the reburial of a few fragments of a 
Union soldier, dug up at the foot of East Cemetery hill. A little 
group of grey haired veterans and a few respectful citizens gathered 
about a little box no larger than a good sized book, resting in a grave 
about a foot in depth, and thus in reverent appreciation showed 
their gratitude for "what they did here.") 

It is given to all men to speak to posterity but 
it is seldom given to man to come back from the 
grave to do it. Jesus and Lazarus did it in words 
of living breath. This hero does it in the frag- 
ments of his own mortality. Like the Quidal- 
quivir of Spain, which flows under the surface and 
appears occasionally to the sight of man, this 
noble warrior comes to light between two graves to 
tell us of the courage that makes men free. 

The fragments that remain are pathetic indeed. 

What once was flesh and blood and life and fire is 

now nothing but arm bone, belt buckle and bullet. 

The lips that kissed a mother's lips good-bye and 

cheered a comrade's failing heart ; the head that 

dreamed the dream of happy days at home and 

happier days to come ; the hands that bore the gun 

and stanched a brother's wounds ; the feet that 

tramped the weary miles while thousands slept in 

208 



BETWEEN TWO GRAVES 209 

peace ; the eye that flashed in carnage and softened 
in pity ; the teeth that clicked while the bullets 
snicked, are all gone back to their native element 
to await in indistinguishable dust the trumpet of 
the Lord. These few fragments will rest un- 
touched among the immortals ; the rest will be 
ploughed and shoveled and harrowed and sown un- 
til the earth shall be dissolved and the heavens 
rolled together as a scroll. 

But how eloquent are these fragments that re- 
main ! The arm helped to bear the heaviest bur- 
den that the nation has ever known. In the 
scorching heat of summer's hottest days it yielded 
its every fibre for the nation's defence. It was 
one of the pillars of fire that led four million slaves 
to freedom's fairest Canaan ; one of the peninsulas 
of valor that pushed out from the love of a cour- 
ageous heart into the froth and ferment of hate's 
stormiest sea. 

The worms have had their fill ; only the mar- 
rowless bone remains ; but from its shallow grave 
it speaks as eloquently to us today as Lincoln 
spoke to that larger host up yonder many years 
ago. 

How eloquent is the belt buckle that goes with 
these sacred remains into the second grave. By 
it we know as well as a government record could 
tell us that this man was not his own. He bears 
on his body, fifty-two years after he fell, the 
marks of a glorious loyalty. Next to the marks 
of the Lord there are no decorations of honor com- 



210 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

parable to a free nation's emblems upon her dar- 
ing heroes. More beautiful than the Victoria 
cross or the Golden Fleece, more precious than the 
tiaras of queens, more holy than the square and 
the compass or even the crescent is the belt plate 
of a Civil War soldier. Prize them, ye who touch 
them with the trembling hand of age today. The 
vigor that snapped them into place in the hurried 
days of old is gone, but their worth is not perish- 
ing with 3^our strength. As the crackling logs 
upon the hearth carry us back to the forest pri- 
meval and show us the cabins and the clearings of 
our revolutionary sires, so your straps and buc- 
kles will carry us back to the days made glorious 
by your deeds. They will burn on the hearth of 
grateful memory long after you are gone and our 
hearts will burn within us as we stand before them. 
But the most eloquent of these historic frag- 
ments of mortality is the little ball of lead which 
was found among them. The other fragments tell 
of devotion and valor. This one speaks of a sac- 
rifice unto death. The others recall Thermopylae, 
Hastings and Tours. This one reminds us of Cal- 
vary. As the nails of the cross hushed the rever- 
ent of old, so this missile of death humbles us to- 
day. In low but audible tones it whispers from its 
shallow tomb, " Ye are not your own, ye are 
bought with a price." And as that whisper enters 
our hearts, let us, the heirs of bygone suffering, in 
the presence of these sacred relics and these few 
veterans who will soon be gathered to their com- 



BETWEEN TWO GRAVES 211 

rades, resolve to make our lives more worthy of 
such sacrifice and more ready to repeat it in what- 
soever way our heavenly Father asks. 

To live for the good of man and die exhausted 
in the service, whether on the field of battle or in 
the arms of friends, is to speak to posterity a mes- 
sage that will warm the hearts of generations un- 
born as the tropic waters of the Gulf warm the 
Arctic coast lines of Scandinavia. Let us learn 
from this little handful of dust the lesson of man- 
hood's highest mission and go back to our homes 
with bigger hearts and higher purposes, resolved 
to give posterity the opportunity of rising up to 
call us blessed as we rise up to call the noble dead 
blessed today. 



FINISHING THE UNFINISHED 

" Commit thy way unto the Lord ; trust also in Him ; 
and He shall bring it to pass." 

Psalm 3T:5. 

In the home of Dickens travellers are shown the 
unfinished manuscript on " The Mystery of Edwin 
Drood," exactly as the great author left it. So 
are travellers shown the unfinished paintings of 
Angelo, Stuart and others. They are not pa- 
thetic, because they stand amid a great array of 
finished masterpieces. What need we care about 
unfinished Edwin Drood when we have David Cop- 
perfield, Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son and all the 
others .^^ The unfinished work at the end of a rich 
life is what is to be expected, for the joy of labor 
will keep a man at work until his hand drops and 
his eye closes. 

The thing that hurts is not the unfinished work 
but the unfinished life. 

There are the two parents of a fair young boy, 
with nurse and doctor beside the bed. How anx- 
iously they watch the doctor's movements, how 
eagerly they question the nurse. Money without 
restriction is at their command and the doctors 
know that anything that science has discovered is 

at their beck and call. They do their best, but 

212 



FINISHING THE UNFINISHED 213 

when their best is done the boy is dead and they 
lay his dear form away in a handsome casket for 
the resurrection day. Unfinished. 

There goes a ruddy young graduate of Yale to 
southern New York, not to barter or buy but to 
suffer and die. Standing in the clear crisp air of 
a September morn he looks bravely at his captors 
and the clear sky beyond, as though talking to the 
unborn centuries, and says, " I only regret that I 
have but one life to lose for my country." He 
was but twenty-one years of age, forty-nine short 
of the allotted three score years and ten. Unpn- 
ished. 

There goes another son of Yale who dies eight 
years before Nathan Hale is born. He loses his 
father at nine, his mother at fourteen, and goes 
to a consumptive's grave at twenty-nine. Carey 
in the providence of God spent forty years in In- 
dia, Moffat fifty-three in Africa, Patton fifty in 
the New Hebrides and Zeisberger sixty among the 
Indians. David Brainard was given but four 
short years among the Indians of America and 
then shunted off by consumption. Unfinislied. 

There lies a little girl sick with a fever, her doll 
in her hand beside her, her mother looking ten- 
derly at both, and praying to the dear Lord that 
her little doll mother may be spared and that her 
own future may be brightened with the sunshine 
of her eyes and the pressure of her arms. But it 
is not so to be. Like many and many another lit- 
tle fairy of a modest little home she goes out in the 



214 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

light of an evening star and leaves the home in 
darkness and in tears. Unfinished. 

Over yonder, beyond the shriek and roar of 
shrapnel and cannon, away back in the early 
Christian era, lives a monk in a cell made by na- 
ture's own hand in the side of a mountain. He 
has not gone there to speak to the ages but to live 
a life of rigorous self-denial and undisturbed com- 
munion with the Infinite. His days and his nights 
are as unvaried as the return of the sunshine and 
the stars. Day after day, night after night, in 
his coarse garb, he repeats his prayers and chants 
his songs, now bending his deep-focused eyes upon 
his secret parchment, now closing it and brooding 
on its thoughts. Buried to the world before he 
died, exacting nothing, contributing nothing, as 
non-productive to his day and generation as the 
little girl who died with her doll in her arm ; sent 
into the world with hands to work, tongue to 
speak, feet to run, eyes to cheer ; none of it done. 
Unfinished. 

Thus from every nook and corner of this world 
comes the cry " unfinished ! " " unfinished ! " as 
" unclean ! " " unclean ! " came from the lepers of 
old. Sad indeed would this world be if there were 
no remedy for the unclean and no satisfaction for 
the unfinished. But He who knoweth our frames 
and remembereth that while we are dust we are 
also only a little lower than the angels has made 
abundant provision for both. The unclean were 
made as pure as the new-born babe, the unfinished 



FINISHING THE UNFINISHED ^15 

are made as complete as a cathedral a thousand 
years in building. 

The little boy who died in the home of wealth 
just before his young manhood came in sight was 
Leland Stanford. His life was not only unfin- 
ished but hardly begun. Death cut the thread al- 
most as soon as the spool began to unwind. But 
love is stronger than death and what death left 
unfinished love completed. Thenceforth the par- 
ents, who with all their wealth couldn't keep their 
boy, dedicated their wealth to the memory of their 
boy and erected Leland Stanford University at a 
cost of forty million dollars. Death robbed him 
of about twenty thousand days. His parents laid 
down about two thousand dollars for every one of 
those days and dedicated them to the education of 
the youth of the western states. Thus, though 
dying in his boyhood, Leland Stanford is going 
about from home to home, from village to village, 
from city to city, as his Master did, calling men 
everywhere to better living. God is flnishmg the 
unfinished. 

The ruddy young graduate of Yale who gives 
up his life for his country at twenty-one on that 
cool September morn rises from an obscure pa- 
triot to one of the country's immortals, becoming 
mightier dead than alive. On the spot on which 
he died stands the heroic figure of Nathan Hale, 
daily reminding the passing thousands that " the 
sufferings of this present world are not worthy to 
be compared with the glory which shall be revealed 



216 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

in us." The college that sent him out honors his 
memory ; the schools of the land teach every gen- 
eration the story of his life and the valor of his 
heart. When his eyes looked the last time out 
over his beloved land his work was unfinished. 
But God is finishing the unfinished. 

That other son of Yale, who slept in the woods 
beside his horse, when he had one, and often 
walked ten and twenty miles to preach to the In- 
dians and died a consumptive at twenty-nine in the 
home of Jonathan Edwards, left a story that has 
grown sweeter with the passing years. Though 
leaving nothing but a heavy grey overcoat, in 
which he often slept in the woods, a compass and 
a few manuscripts as a material legacy, David 
Brainard left a life of devotion that has been the 
inspiration of thousands. 

Carey was influenced by his story. Carey 
spent forty years in India and was instrumental 
in having the Bible translated into forty different 
dialects and distributed among three hundred mil- 
lion people. Two hundred and twelve millions of 
Bibles were distributed during his forty years in 
India. From Carey, Marsden and Martyn and 
hundreds of others caught the fire and there are 
innumerable thousands today who are " attempt- 
ing great things for God and expecting great 
things from God " because Brainard lived. Did 
he live in vain ? God is finishing the unfinished. 

That little girl with the doll in her arm, going 
to her grave when the rose was in the bud, lived 



FINISHING THE UNFINISHED 217 

long enough to make an indelible impression upon 
the heart of a school companion. Trapping him 
in school, she loiters after school to tell him she 
is sorry that she spelled the word. Forty years 
pass by ; the boy has grown to manhood, and as he 
goes slowly down the western slope of life's long 
hill he recalls that little girl and says reminis- 
cently to himself: 

" Still memory to a grey-haired man 
That sweet child face is showing. 

Dear girl ! the grasses on her grave 
Have forty years been growing! 

" He lives to learn in life's hard school; 

How few who pass above him 
Lament their triumph and his loss 

Like her, — because they love him." 

Is that little girl, who died in Whittier's boy- 
hood, dead.? She lives, she speaks, she blesses, she 
ennobles thousands upon thousands today, a cen- 
tury after she passed on. Unfinished when she 
fell asleep, — The Lord is ftnishing the unfinished 
today. 

That monk who lived and died in his lonely cell 
like a wild bird of the wilderness, never coming 
out into the world and never bearing any of the 
world's burdens, lived long enough to write a song 
of praise to God. It was in Latin and was writ- 
ten only for his own devotion. After singing it a 
few times, the notes dying among the rocks that 
gave it birth, he died. A few years ago, after a 



218 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

lapse of over a thousand years, that manuscript 
was found and translated into English and is now 
one of the beautiful songs of our English hym- 
nology. After a millennium God finished the wn- 
pnished. 

But you say, not every one is as fortunate as 
these people were. If that little New England 
girl had gone to another school and been the play- 
mate of another boy than Whittier she would not 
have been immortalized. If David Brainard had 
died in an Indian wigwam instead of the home of 
Jonathan Edwards, his story would not have en- 
circled the globe. If Nathan Hale had not had 
the eager pens of brilliant New England authors 
to tell his story and sing his praises, his star, too, 
might have grown dim with the years. 

You ask about the soldiers who have been for- 
gotten, the thousands who lie four deep in 
trenches, the brave who have gone to the bottom 
of the sea. How about the thousands upon thou- 
sands of little girls as sweet of soul as Whittier's 
friend.^ Will their work be finished too.'' As 
surely as the work of any. Let us not confuse 
post-mortem fame with post-mortem usefulness. 
You can be a great benefactor though your grave 
be forgotten within a decade after you are gone. 

Who gave the world the first mariner's compass, 
who built the first blacksmith's forge, who first 
thought of the arch and the chimney, who first 
turned the earth with a plough, whose mind first 
thought of the weaver's shuttle, who laid the first 



FINISHING THE UNFINISHED 219 

keel of a ship, who made the first hinge, who first 
melted iron? The works of Edison and Field and 
Bell and Marconi and Stephenson rest on the 
works of these men as the bridge rests on its piers 
and the house on its foundation. Take their work 
out of the world and we would all go back to the 
caves. Their lives were very incomplete and their 
tools very crude but God finished the unfinished. 

So will every worthy life be finished. " Commit 
thy way unto the Lord ; trust also in Him ; and He 
shall bring it to pass." Whether we pass away as 
little children with the dimples of babyhood still on 
our face or as parent with a helpless little brood 
weeping around our bed, God will finish the unfin- 
ished. If our work is honest and our heart is true 
our life will grow richer as the years go by. 
When Milton lived he could only get one hundred 
dollars for his immortal " Paradise Lost." In 
our own day his signature alone was sold for over 
sixteen thousand dollars. The little scraps of 
your influence, passed out with a loving heart to 
your children and your friends, will be passed on 
by them to others and from them to others until 
they become as sweet as the oracles of God. Oh 
let our lives be such that the Lord can finish them 
into something beautiful. There is one thing that 
the Lord cannot do, and that is to build a palace 
on a half-finished barn. He completes what was 
begun after the fashion of the beginning. 

For years after Absalom died, the Jews, in pass- 
ing, threw stones on the spot where he lost his life. 



220 RELIGIOUS RHEUMATISM 

A great pyramid of stones soon commemorated his 
unfilial rascality. They stoned the place of his 
death because he stoned the heart of his father. 
" Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap." 

For two thousand years the reverent of earth 
have been going to the grave in the garden where 
the Saviour of men was once interred, and bowing 
in holy reverence there. They bow their heads 
and their hearts there because He bowed His will 
to His heavenly Father and did always those 
things which pleased Him. 

So is it ever. God is no respecter of persons. 
He who does the will of God will, like the setting 
sun, leave behind him a trail of light and a field of 
stars that will gladden and guide unnumbered pil- 
grims. And to live in those we leave behind is not 
to die. 



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